Hi all, I'm a newbie to the unRAID system. I just bought a NAS with two 2.5G WAN ports, planning to install unRAID on it, and thinking maybe I can use it as the net gateway for my home network. But, as I'll assign my static public IPv4 to it, I think a certain level of cybersecurity is necessary. After some research, I came to this pfSense stuff (and OPNsense since I haven't decided which one to go with). My plan now is to use a VM in unRAID to run a firewall, and after that, I'll deploy some filter such as AdBlocker Home so that my home network is safe and clean. 

 

However, I also heard some people saying having a virtualized firewall in unRAID is not a good idea as it's not meant for these kinds of VM/ docker, and it's just a file-saving system. I only used the Synology system before, so I have no idea about VM in unRAID's performance. Do you have any thoughts on my plan or do you have any recommendations on the security of network with a fixed public IP?

 

Here I also attach my plan for the unRAID usage for your reference. Any ideas or suggestions are very much appreciated!

 

You can, I do it with Sophos XG firewall Home Edition. If you wan to go a step further in security/performance, you can pass-trough the physical NICs to the VM. At least 2 one for WAN and another one for LAN. Then the LAN with a Cable goes to the switch and from the switch everywhere, including unraid. So at least you will need 3 physical NIC in your Unraid Server for this 2 work.

Of course for additional security you can do VLANs configuring them in the FW, switch and UNRAID

A recommendation is having and additional NIC just for administration access to unraid.

 

Forget pfsense is not opensource anymore or free, use Sophos XG or OpenSense

 

Those people has no idea, UNRAID is a NAS mainly but has VM like proxmox with basically the same features, or the features that could be required to do this. So if you understand what you are doing, is totally fine.

Edited May 10, 20251 yr by L0rdRaiden