I have been running IPFire on an old Pentium 4 for many years. It had served me very well until the computer itself had some sort of catastrophic hardware failure. The drive, surprisingly is still fine but the computer won’t power up. I have NOT investigated the cause as of yet but I did have a replacement I was able to pop in and keep going. What this meant was it was time to move on and replace it. This is something I had been planning as I already had the hardware ready to go, a WatchGuard XTM 5 Series. This machine had been long retired and I’ll have more on this whole project soon but I want to start with something quick and simple that took me far too long to figure out.
After setting up the OPNsense box, setting the DHCP range and the CIDR notation to give me the number of IP addresses I want to be addressable on my network. I had one irritating issue to deal with. Local hostname resolution. This is very important to me as I like to be able to address a machine by its hostname, not the IP address. I want to call up a device, easily by its name as I can’t remember the IP addresses of the various machines.
After some browsing and not finding a solution, I referenced an old article I wrote on pfSense which helped me narrow it down. That helped me find the options (Unbound DNS) that were needed.
Services > Unbound DNS > General
The two options I have selected are Register ISC DHCP4 Leases and Register DHCP Static Mappings. I have several devices that are DHCP and several more that I have set static reservations to specific IPs for many devices on my network, everything from Servers, certain computers, printer and every light and fan switch as well as the thermostat. I want to be able to log into a device just by it’s name, although I did do a pretty decent job of organizing my many “smart” devices.
The bottom line is, this works perfectly. It is absolutely tip top, and I could not be happier. Since the vast majority of my computers are named after Transformers, when I need to remote into Optimus, Sideswipe or Ironhide, I just have to type that using whatever protocol I so desire. Truly, this is absolutely fantastic. Such a simple fix for an incredibly important feature.
Final Thoughts
More to come with OPNsense. I am still learning how to properly use this and configure it for my specific needs. I have learned a lot since my first installation of pfSense and subsequent IPFire deployment. So far, I am very happy with OPNsense and am now leaning towards this as my firewall of choice. I do not want to take away from IPFire or pfSense, they are all great, this just happens to be my firewall system of choice today.
More to come on OPNsense to include details on how I installed and configured this device for my use case.
References
https://opnsense.org/
pfSense Box Setup for Home or Small Office
IPFire | Open Source, Linux based, Firewall, Install and Configuration
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