(Re)Building Firewalls, Gateways and LAN

All started with two issues:

• First the prior OpnSense Qotom Router destroyed its internal SSD and appears to be generally suspect. A new device was ordered.
• Second our ISP decided our Gateway/Modem was approaching EOL and needed replacement with a newer 1 Gbps class device.

The replacement Modem arrived between the Holidays and I wasted several hours with the ISP repeatedly updating and provisioning the new device on Monday January 2nd. Basic parts came up but truly the information, APP and online help were subpar. Only when I captured an agent and got the issues escalated upwards twice was progress made.

In the process my SmartLink Remote station is again down, but as I can see the station from outside it will be be configurations that need manually updating.

The replacement Qotom Router (actually a mini-pc with enough NICS to serve as a router) arrived late Tuesday (January 3rd) and I I will be starting the process to load & configure it, perhaps on the weekend. Rather worried that my 2-3 hour time budget could be inadequate to get it ready, installed and troubleshoot.

I’ve downloaded a fresh copy of OpnSense

https://opnsense.org/download/

And already built a bootable USB stick using Rufus

https://rufus.ie/
https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/

I also have the old configuration file ready to load into the new device.

If all this works well it should get me 98% of the way, but the worried that the learning curve may be a vertical wall for that last 2%. Mostly because network configuration is a rare task as I may go a year or more without touching network workings.

Upside to the time investment is we are seeing solid gigabyte throughput on the wired portion of our LAN, and a wireless device limited 600 Mbps on the wireless side.  That is more than triple where we were at before.

73

Steve
K9ZW