Hello All,

I have "home made" routers running on some 10 sites.
They mainly consist on Gibabyte motherboards. On it I run Centos or Debian, they act as router/dhcp/Shorewall/Squid server.

But now I need a similar setup but with at least 3 network interfaces, one lan and two wan's.

My supplier says I'm not going to find similar boards with +2 nic's
I was advised to use Pfsense. I'm sure that works great, but would prefer to stick to Linux.

What should I use? Just a workstation with 3 nics or maybe a small server?

Thanks for any help.

Greetings, J.

Kind of two questions.

One is an ability to have more than two nics. Second is distro choice.

One can add in a nic card or a usb nic usually. They do make dedicated small firewall hardware that has some 4 or so nic's on them. I see them at amazon and other places. Generally x86/x64 processor types but there are some few boards with ARM processors. Might be more of a learning curve to convert to ARM. User load under full firewall will determine the hardware.

Nothing wrong with Pfsense and their hardware vendor for choices.

Might look at Untangle firewall too. Some good features.

Given that all a router does is pass traffic back and fourth, a workstation should be sufficient; it likely wouldn't need to be all that powerful.

You can get NICs that have 1, 2 or 4 interfaces. So, if expansion slots is the issue that's not a problem. But you usually need PCI-E slots for multi-interface cards.

I always implement my firewalls/routers in PCEngines embedded systems. Recently they have introduced 4 LAN systems.
https://www.pcengines.ch/apu4b4.htm
Depending on what your processor loads are, these might be suitable for you.

The systems are very high quality and you can also purchase perfectly fitting metal enclosures. Their order handling is flawless. It is Swiss made, 'nuf said.

I created my routers myself as well. Before I learned PFSense, that is. Since I know PFSense I don't waste my time anymore on re-inventing the wheel. PFSense is FreeBSD, so at least Linux related.

jlinkels

Hello All,

thanks for the replies.
Looks like a lot of options are open, but Pfsense seems to be the way to go.

greetings, J.

You could try OpenWrt

https://openwrt.org/

which is available for PCs....