Maybe someone in this thread has a couple of ideas:

What’s the simplest way to spin up a simple „cattle, not pet“ routing VM? I don’t want to mess with any state, I just want version controllable config files. Ideally, if applying a version fails, it would automatically roll back to the previous state.

OpenWRT seems like it fits my description most closely, but maybe someone here is a fan of something more flashy/modern.

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thequux 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

NixOS using https://github.com/thequux/nix-zone-firewall/ worked well for me for many years. I only stopped using it because my poor embedded Linux machine started having issues and it made more sense to go with a Mikrotik than to buy a new device to run as a soft router.

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moqmar 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That sounds like you might like VyOS. I found it to be relatively easy to achieve exactly what I wanted, but went back to a GUI as it turned out I wanted a pet and not start a farm.

	▲	nullpoint420 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> but went back to a GUI as it turned out I wanted a pet and not start a farm. This made me chuckle, I'm definitely going to quote this the next time our K8S cluster has issues

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tombert 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I recommend Pfsense or OpnSense if your hardware works with a FreeBSD-based thing. They're super easy to set up and don't have many surprises.

After I upgraded to a 10GbE ethernet card in my previous router, my card didn't work correctly with FreeBSD-based stuff anymore. I changed to ClearOS and that was actually comparably easy to Pfsense...maybe even easier? I recommend checking that one out.

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miladyincontrol 7 hours ago | parent [-]

While I am a linux advocate for networking in the current day outside of hyper specific CDN use cases (a la netflix)... its pretty common for people to just virtualize opnsense/pfsense to take advantage of linux network drivers. Especially if their actual routing requirements are modest and dont require full use of the hardware.

Beyond getting support for devices completely absent on freebsd, quality of drivers, bugs much more rapidly squashed, and general misc features absent on the bsd side like NBASE-T.

	▲	kev009 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This is the kind of low quality information you see on fanboy forums. There is nothing special about Linux drivers and anyone can go look at them. A lot of hardware uses a HAL and there is a smaller OS adaption therefore most of the code is similar across OSes. Virtualization means you now have multiple layers of drivers and privileged code in the mix to add and amplify bugs, it can and should work but if you are doing this in the name of stability that is a bit curious. The reason Netflix can do what they do is they have good relationship with their HW vendors, NVIDIA(Mellanox) and Chelsio. If they were on Linux, they'd need the same level of support.
	▲	tombert 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I don't know enough about this level of IT to rebut this. I use Linux for my router now because my server is NixOS, so I was able to consolidate my router into my server and turn off a machine (and thus save a little power), and I have so thoroughly drunk the Kool-aid for NixOS that I kind of want to put it everywhere. I run the latest kernel and I update daily, so I think most bugfixes (and hopefully security updates) will manifest quick enough.

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bembem_c 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

OPNsense. I use it on dell optiplex SFF for about 8 years. Was never tempted to use VM for routing, but many do.

Version control is in the GUI, you can adapt for your needs the number of changes you need. automatic config.xml backup also possible.

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SamDc73 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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