The original title is "OPNsense on bare metal — 18 months as the only perimeter"

Short summary

A detailed 18-month retrospective of running OPNsense on bare metal as the sole perimeter firewall for a homelab rack hosting Akash provider workloads. The author explains why bare metal was chosen over a Proxmox VM (compute separation, fate isolation, clean ISP handoff), details the hardware (Dell Optiplex 7080, i7-10700, 32GB RAM, Intel i350 NICs), and promises four war stories plus four things still undone. The piece argues retrospectives that admit remaining gaps are more useful than ones that only list successes.

• •18 months running OPNsense on bare metal as sole perimeter for an Akash provider homelab
• •Bare metal chosen over VM for fate isolation, compute preservation, and clean ISP termination
• •Includes hardware specs, VLAN trunking design, and honest list of unfinished security tasks

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