Can I make A Raspberry Pi 3 Firewall

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jonnyboyy101

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Sep 29, 2014
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So I am going to be adding a server to my home network that may host a website and or be a file server with access over the internet. Before I do this I would like to add a firewall (hardware) to the network to protect my home network from incoming traffic requesting access to the server.

I would like to use a raspberry pi 3 as my firewall device and find a firewall image to run. Unfortunately all the firewall operating systems such as ipfire and openwrt will not run on pi 3. I can downgrade and buy a pi 2 and run openWrt on it but my concern is the bottleneck for the data rate for the pi2 when using its Ethernet port and a usb to Ethernet adapter. If the bottleneck creates my speeds to go down to 50Mbps then i am fine being that my speeds are usually 50-60Mbps anyway. If it brings the speed down to 35Mbps then I will start getting concerned.

My question is does anyone know any firewall img files that will work on the Pi 3, or if using the pi 2 with the setup above will still have decent transfer rate speed.

My last resort is to buy a firewall device but if i can get away with a pi firewall instead, that would be nice.
 
Solution
kyzarvs
Just to make sure you are aware:
Your firewall should only be concerned with data going to / from the internet, local transfers from your PC to server shouldn't pass through it.

This is the reason I don't use a Pi (I use an HP proliant microserver with our own fork of IPFire) - you can't get two fast network ports for 30+Mbit internet connections.
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kyzarvs

kyzarvs

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Aug 19, 2008
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Just to make sure you are aware:
Your firewall should only be concerned with data going to / from the internet, local transfers from your PC to server shouldn't pass through it.

This is the reason I don't use a Pi (I use an HP proliant microserver with our own fork of IPFire) - you can't get two fast network ports for 30+Mbit internet connections.
 
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Solution
Mark RM

Mark RM

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Jul 16, 2014
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I had a similar issue, I bought a meegoPad T05 stick computer running windows 10 for 90 bucks, added two more USB to ethernet dongles and installed pfSense under Hyper V to work as my firewall. Why? Because it was cheap, small and because pfSense does a good job at managing my MLPPP DSL bonding into my house. The stick came with two gigs RAM, the BSD based virtual machine runs fine with Hyper V and using Windows 10 as the Hypervisor ensures I can use the only truly great thing about Windows- the driver support (for things like cheap no name USB to Ethernet dongles and printers).

I don't even have a monitor on it, I just RDP in and check or change what I need to and manage the firewall via it's web interface. Whole thing is about three watts when running if you include the powered USB hub I have on it.

So in total it has four network connections, three wired and one wireless, two wired are used for the two DSL connections, one wired is used for the pfSense LAN connection and the wireless I leave alone as the management network interface for the actual Windows install.

Cheap , easy, reliable. I built my own appliance.

Edit - I should point out I upgraded to Win Pro just because I have spare licenses, but I could easily have used Oracle Virtualbox for pfSense on Windows Home to do the same thing. pfSense works in Virtualbox too.
 
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