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soft-router

Home router setup and associated server hardware and software configurations.

Outline

We want to run pfSense within a QEmu VM on the N100 Computer running Ubuntu server.

QEmu VM is a very lightweight system, that allows easy pass-through of the host CPU and it's features, together with PCI devices. In our case, we wish to pass-through 2 of the 2.5G I226-V LAN devices to be owned and managed within the VM running pfSense.

Furthermore, the host Ubuntu server gives us control over changes we would like to make to the VM.

Containers were considered, however since pfSense runs on a different kernel, QEmu VM was selected.

Hardware

Hardware used from AliExpress:

  • 12th Gen Intel N100 Computer with 4 x 2.5G I226-V LAN NVMe Industrial Fanless Mini PC (16GB Ram 256GB NVMe)
  • HORACO 2.5G Managed Switch 8 Port 2.5GBASE-T Fanless

Architecture

plot

Note that both ETH0 (host comms) and ETH2 (pfSense LAN) from our N100 Computer are both connected to the managed switch. That is, pfSense runs on the host within a VM using ETH1 (WAN) and ETH2 (LAN) as pass-through PCI devices, and provide a network for the host to connect via the same managed switch. This allows us to access the host server via our WiFi access points for future configuration and maintenance.

BIOS Setup

Ensure you enable Intel Virtualization (VT-x) and Direct I/O (VT-d) from the BIOS.

Server Setup

Configuring the N100 Computer.

Install Host Ubuntu Server

Installed Ubuntu 24.04 onto the N100 Computer.

User Groups and Limits

We use the Linux Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization solution to run the QEmu VM seemlessly at close to metal speeds. To do this, we need to add our user to the 'kvm' group as follows:

sudo adduser `id -un` kvm

Increase the resource limits for the users by editing '/etc/security/limits.conf' and append:

<user-id> soft memlock 20000000
<user-id> hard memlock 20000000

Enable Linux IOMMU Support

Our setup uses the Linux Input-Output Memory Management Unit (IOMMU), which translates device virtual addresses to physical address. We use this to pass-through our ETH1 and ETH2 LAN devices from our host Linux computer to the QEmu VM.

Edit /etc/default/grub and navigate to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="" and make the following changes:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="intel_iommu=on kvm.ignore_msrs=1"

For it to take effect run:

sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

After rebooting the server, check that Linux IOMMU Support is enabled by running:

sudo dmesg | grep -i -e DMAR -e IOMMU

You should see [ --------] DMAR: IOMMU enabled in the output dump.

Enable Linux Kernel Module VFIO

For the ETH1 and ETH2 LAN devices we wish to pass-through to our QEmu VM, we need the host Linux Kernel to assign the Virtual Function I/O (VFIO) driver to these devices instead of the default driver, which is normally used to operate these devices on the host system.

For example, if you run the command lspci -nnk you will see Kernel driver in use: igc for ETH1 and ETH2 (it was igc for the particular hardware used in this example).

Copy ubuntu/etc/modules-load.d/vfio-pci.conf to /etc/modules-load.d/ on your server and run:

sudo chmod 644 /etc/modules-load.d/vfio-pci.conf

PCI Addresses of I226-V LAN Devices

Figure out the PCI device addresses of the two I226-V LAN devices you wish to use with pfSense. To do this, you use commands like lspci -nnk and lshw -short -c network. In my case these address were 0000:02:00.0 for ETH1 and 0000:03:00.0 ETH2, and you will see these addressed used throughout this document and scripts provided in this repository. Change these to match your specific PCI device addresses.

Make Linux Kernel use VFIO Module for I226-V LAN Devices

Copy ubuntu/etc/udev/rules.d/10-qemu.rules to /etc/udev/rules.d/ on your server and edit the file to change 0000:02:00.0 and 0000:03:00.0 to the PCI addresses, and change 8086 125c to the vendor-id and device-id of your devices.

Then apply by running:

sudo udevadm control --reload-rules
sudo udevadm trigger

Running command lspci -nnk will now show Kernel driver in use: vfio-pci for your assigned devices.

Create pfSense disk image

After all the host server setup is complete, ensure to reboot the server for all to take effect before proceeding here.

First make a 32G disk image:

dd if=/dev/zero of=disk-raw iflag=fullblock bs=1G count=32

Download your copy of netgate-installer-amd64.iso (pfSense installer).

Then start QEmu mounting your disk image, ISO installer file and LAN path-through devices:

qemu-system-x86_64 \
    -enable-kvm \
    -cpu host \
    -smp 4 \
    -k en-us \
    -cdrom netgate-installer-amd64.iso \
    -drive id=disk,file=<path-to-image>/disk-raw,format=raw,if=none \
    -device ahci,id=ahci \
    -device ide-hd,drive=disk,bus=ahci.1 \
    -boot d \
    -device vfio-pci,host=0000:02:00.0 \
    -device vfio-pci,host=0000:03:00.0 \
    -m size=4096

pfSense Setup

The only pfSense setup that is compulsory here is to make sure you chose your ETH1 and ETH2 to align with your WAM (Ethernet cable from your ISP) and your LAN (Ethernet cable to your 8x port managed switch).

Then you will connect all your household Ethernet devices to your switch, including your WiFi devices.

A quick note on WiFi devices, setup all of your WiFi devices as Access Point only mode. It is also nice to setup the exact same Network Name (SSID) and password for all of your WiFi devices, just make sure you chose a different channel for each if you have multiple access points.

It could be a good idea to also use command nmcli d wifi to check nearby WiFi signals and to check what channels they are using, so that you pick a different channel to minimize clashing.

Make pfSense Persistent

Copy ubuntu/etc/init.d/qemu-pfsense to /etc/init.d/ path on your server and edit to change the <user-id> and <path-to-image> on the following lines:

exec sudo -H -u <user-id> bash -c 'qemu-system-x86_64

and

-drive id=disk,file=<path-to-image>/disk-raw,format=raw,if=none

Then for it to take effect run:

sudo chmod a+x /etc/init.d/qemu-pfsense
sudo update-rc.d qemu-pfsense defaults
sudo update-rc.d qemu-pfsense enable

You may need to reboot at this stage. When your system comes back up check /var/log/syslog to see if qemu instances started without issues. You can also use 'htop' to check the active running processes. In this example, with the N100 running QEmu with 4 cores, htop shows 4 instances of qemu-system-x86_64.

Improve Booting Up Time

Copy ubuntu/etc/netplan/99_config.yaml to /etc/netplan/ path on your server and run:

sudo chmod 600 ubuntu/etc/netplan/99_config.yaml
sudo netplan apply

This added the optional: true to all but the first ETH0 device, which speeds up the boot time.

You can check the booting up time analysis with the command:

systemd-analyze blame

Before this change, the main slowness was coming from:

systemd-networkd-wait-online.service too slow

Cockpit

To make monitoring of your server easier install Cockpit:

sudo apt-get install cockpit

Start and enable Cockpit:

sudo systemctl enable --now cockpit.socket

Then browse to https://server:9090/

Different Cockpit components can be installed, for example Performance Co-Pilot:

sudo apt install cockpit-pcp

Then restart Cockpit:

sudo systemctl restart --now cockpit.socket