Or better yet, OPNsense, as the NetGate team has time and time again shown that they are incredibly petty, and do not want to support the community in the most basic of ways.

+1 on OPNsense. I switched from pfsense to opnsense a few months ago without issues.

+1, I switched to OPNsense about 11 months ago and could not be happier. Once the dust settled I also changed some of my small buiness customers over and it was a smooth experience.

The only thing holding me back from switching to OPNsense is the lack of pfblockerNG. To the best of my knowledge, there is no competing package available at the time.

> x86-64 system with four gigabit ethernet ports

Do you have any suggestions / personal experience with systems like this? I'm really concerned about getting something that isn't powerful enough to process stuff at gigabit+ rates, and most of the "routers" I've seen get pricey to do that.

The pcengines APU2 will do gigabit happily on four interfaces with passive cooling and ECC memory, there’s nothing but actual servers which will do more realistically speaking.

+1 for APU2. I've written about my experience with it (+ NixOS) here: https://skogsbrus.xyz/blog/2022/06/12/router

As the other commenter said though - max speed is 1gbps. And approx 200mbit/s over wifi with 5ghz and the same network card I used.

You can get a Supermicro X10SLH-LN6TF, 6 10GBbit ports, for less then $100 on ebay.

cough OPNSense[0] cough

[0]:https://opnsense.org/

+1 OPNSense. Extremely capable and stable. Been running a complex setup for a year and a half without a single hitch.

> x86-64 system with four gigabit ethernet ports

This is an annoyingly unfilled product space. I keep on wanting and the market keeps failing to provide something small, cheap, and with 2 gige ports. Heck, I don't even need x86_64, as long as there's a well supported Debian port.

Anyone have suggestions for even two gigabit ports and the lowest possible price?

Also, I'm curious if anyone has concrete examples of advantages of anything other than Debian for my router. I want to know if I'm missing out on cool features or some such :)

Earlier this week I bought a COOFUN GK41 with two Gbit Ethernet ports for $160. That included 8 GB ram and 120 GB SSD. It arrived yesterday, and I haven't installed OPNsense on it yet. So I can't report how well it works, or even whether it works.

I was considering a QOTOM Q355G4 until I decided I didn't need 4 NICs. They're $300-400ish, depending on configuration.

So the hardware is there, it's just from companies I'd never heard of.

Lowest seems to be Protectli (https://eu.protectli.com/vault-2-port/) or any of the chinese 4-port devices (Topton, Qotom, KingNovy, ...) in a barebones config where you add your own RAM & SSD.

ARM-based devices are not supported by pfSense / opnSense so you should stay with x86_64 based devices.

Used rack server is also an option if you want room to grow, Sandy Bridge and newer models have decent power consumption. My dl360e idles around 40W with five disks. Four gigabit ports, BMC, ECC, and you can virtualize pfsense and run additional containers and VMs on top.

I have an old 4790k running OPNSense. Old gaming rigs make amazing 40gig routers.

What's your power consumption on it?