Call me paranoid if you must, but I take all sorts of precautions to bolster the security of my devices. Running a router/firewall OS with hardened rules is one of them, and I’ve been using an OPNsense-powered mini-PC for a long time to secure my home lab. However, I recently went with a fresh installation of OPNsense 25.7.2 on a separate machine, which didn’t go all that well in the beginning.

Regardless, I figured it was time to bring a custom firewall to my travel setup. For reference, I tend to use my TP-Link router alongside a tiny 4-port switch whenever I need to leave my tech cave for extended periods, and while the former works well for the most part, I wanted to integrate a dedicated firewall/router distro into the setup. A tiny single-board computer seemed ripe for the task, as I didn’t want to lug around a larger mini-PC on my travels. So, here’s a log of how I turned my Zimaboard 2 SBC into a powerful router.

I had a couple of SBCs to choose from

But I went with the Zimaboard 2

If you’ve read my XDA articles – or even just checked the thumbnail images – you’d know I had a ton of options to choose from. For months, I’d used OpenWRT on my Raspberry Pi 5, and it served me well until I started dabbling with x86 firewall distros. I could technically go with the same setup, but I’d already configured my Raspberry Pi as the monitoring hub for my home lab. And truth be told, I adore OPNsense more than any other router OS. Although I’ve heard that it’s possible to get it running on Arm systems using some workarounds, I didn’t want to spend days running the distro on incompatible hardware.

That left most of the Arm SBCs out of the equation. Next, I considered going for my Radxa X4, which is easily my favorite SBC on the market. But it only includes a single Ethernet port, meaning I’d have to use a USB-to-RJ45 adapter to connect the SBC to my LAN switch – which is far from ideal (even though I had to resort to it when setting up OPNsense on my old PC).

That’s when I remembered the Zimaboard 2 that, on paper, seemed perfect for the job. Not only does it possess an x86 Intel N150 processor and dual 2.5G Ethernet ports, but it uses the Intel I226-V controller, making it a lot better than its Realtek (or god forbid, Marvell AQtian) counterparts you’d find on typical PCs or cheap NICs.

The setup process was absolutely painless

A far cry from my experience with an old PC

With the decision-making part out of the way, it was time to don my tinkering hat and install OPNsense on the Zimaboard 2. I could technically go for a virtualized setup, but I didn’t want to deal with the hardware passthrough challenges. So, I went with a bare-bones OPNsense setup, and began flashing a USB drive with the VGA .img file after downloading it from the official link.

After I’d booted into the OPNsense interface by selecting the USB drive in the BIOS, I ran the installer. Luckily for me, OPNsense immediately showed both interfaces – a far cry from my experience using a Marvell AQtian card with the router OS. However, I had some difficulty when adding the WAN and LAN interfaces, as OPNsense couldn’t assign a WAN address to my setup.

Turns out, I had to flip the names of the interfaces, as igc0 referred to the RJ45 connector on the right, as opposed to what I’d initially considered. I also tried to install OPNsense on the 32GB eMMC storage, but ran into some partition issues. So, I went with an external SSD for the time being (even though I plan to configure it on the eMMC module to save some space in my travel bag).

Besides those minor gripes, the rest of the setup procedure went by without a hitch, and I was able to get my OPNsense travel firewall up and running.

I low-key want to replace my home router with this setup

For an SBC-powered setup, the Zimaboard 2 holds its own against OPNsense pretty well. I quickly created some VLANs on the makeshift router and connected it to my Zyxel managed switch. Lo and behold, it worked just as well as my home setup – potentially even better, since I could use the hardware offloading feature on its Intel I226-V controller. Since the Zimaboard 2 includes a PCIe slot, I low-key want to buy a Mellanox card and see if I could tinker with extra interfaces. Plus, I also want to turn the x86 SBC into a full-fledged Proxmox node to house all my containers alongside an OPNsense VM – one that uses PCIe passthrough for the LAN interface.