Settings

Besides the configuration options that every component has, OPNsense also contains a lot of general settings that you can tweak. This page contains an overview of them.

Administration

The settings on this page concerns logging into OPNsense. The “Secure Shell” settings are described under Creating Users & Groups.

Setting	Explanation
Web GUI
Protocol	It is strongly recommended to leave this on “HTTPS”
SSL Certificate	By default, a self-signed certificate is used. Certificates can be added via System ‣ Trust ‣ Certificates.
SSL Ciphers	Can be used to limit SSL cipher selection in case the system defaults are undesired. Note that restrictive use may lead to an inaccessible web GUI.
Enable HTTP Strict Transport Security	Enforces loading the web GUI over HTTPS, even when the connection is hijacked (man-in-the-middle attack), and do not allow the user to trust an invalid certificate for the web GUI.
TCP port	Can be useful if there are other services that are reachable via port 80/443 of the external IP, for example.
Disable web GUI redirect rule	If you change the port, a redirect rule from port 80/443 will be created. Check this to disable creating this rule.
Disable logging of web GUI successful logins
Session Timeout	Time in minutes to expire idle management sessions.
Disable DNS Rebinding Checks	OPNsense contains protection against DNS rebinding by filtering out DNS replies with local IPs. Check this box to disable this protection if it interferes with web GUI access or name resolution in your environment.
Alternate Hostnames	Alternate, valid hostnames (to avoid false positives in referrer/DNS rebinding protection).
HTTP Compression	Reduces size of transfer, at the cost of slightly higher CPU usage.
Enable access log	Log all access to the Web GUI (for debugging/analysis)
Listen interfaces	Can be used to limit interfaces on which the Web GUI can be accessed. This allows freeing the interface for other services, such as HAProxy.
Disable HTTP_REFERER enforcement check	The origins of requests are checked in order to provide some protection against CSRF. You can turn this off of it interferes with external scripts that interact with the Web GUI.
Console
Use the virtual terminal driver (vt)	When unchecked, OPNsense will use the older sc driver.
Primary Console	The primary console will show boot script output. All consoles display OS boot messages, console messages, and the console menu.
Secondary Console	See above.
Serial Speed	Allows adjusting the baud rate. 115200 is the most common.
Use USB-based serial ports	Listen on /dev/ttyU0, /dev/ttyU1, … instead of /dev/ttyu0.
Password protect the console menu	Can be unchecked to allow physical console access without password. This can avoid lock-out, but at the cost of attackers being able to do anything if they gain physical access to your system.
Authentication
Server	Select one or more authentication servers to validate user credentials against. Multiple servers can make sense with remote authentication methods to provide a fallback during connectivity issues. When nothing is specified the default of “Local Database” is used.
Sudo	Permit sudo usage for administrators with shell access.
Disable integrated authentication	When set, console login, SSH, and other system services can only use standard UNIX account authentication.

Cron

Cron is a service that is used to execute jobs periodically. Cron jobs can be viewed by navigating to System ‣ Settings ‣ Cron. New jobs can be added by click the + button in the lower right corner.

When adding a new job or modifying an existing one, you will be presented with fields that directly reflect the cron file syntax and that mostly speak for themselves. A job needs a name, a command, command parameters (if applicable), a description (optional, but recommend) and most importantly, a schedule. All time-related fields share the same syntax:

• An asterisk (*) can be used to mean “any”

• Specifying multiple values is possible using the comma: 1,4,9

• Ranges can be specified using a dash: 4-9

General

The general settings mainly concern network-related settings like the hostname. The general setting can be set by going to System ‣ Settings ‣ General. The following settings are available:

Setting	Explanation
System
Hostname	Hostname without domain, e.g.: firewall
Domain	The domain, e.g. mycorp.com, home, office, private, etc. Do not use ‘local’ as a domain name. It will cause local hosts running mDNS (avahi, bonjour, etc.) to be unable to resolve local hosts not running mDNS.
Time zone
Language	Default language. Can be overridden by users.
Theme	More themes can be installed via plug-ins.
Networking
Prefer to use IPv4 even if IPv6 is available
DNS servers	A list of DNS servers, optionally with a gateway. These DNS servers are also used for the DHCP service, DNS services and for PPTP VPN clients. When using multiple WAN connections there should be at least one unique DNS server per gateway.
Allow DNS server list to be overridden by DHCP/PPP on WAN	If this option is set, DNS servers assigned by a DHCP/PPP server on the WAN will be used for their own purposes (including the DNS services). However, they will not be assigned to DHCP and PPTP VPN clients.
Do not use the local DNS service as a nameserver for this system	When enabling local DNS services such as Dnsmasq and Unbound, OPNsense will use these as a nameserver. Check this option to prevent this.
Allow default gateway switching	If the link where the default gateway resides fails switch the default gateway to another available one.

Tunables

Tunables are the settings that go into the sysctl.conf file, which allows tweaking of low-level system settings. They can be set by going to System ‣ Settings ‣ Tunables.

Here, the currently active settings can be viewed and new ones can be created. All valid sysctl.conf settings can be added this way if desired. A list of possible values can be obtained by issuing sysctl -a on an OPNsense shell.

Miscellaneous

As the name implies, this section contains the settings that do not fit anywhere else.

Setting	Explanation
Cryptography settings
Diffie-Hellman parameters	The server and client needs to use the same parameters in order to set up a connection. How parameters are updated can be tweaked. Please leave on default unless you know why to change it.
Hardware acceleration	Select your method of hardware acceleration, if present. Check the full help for hardware-specific advice.
Use /dev/crypto	Old hardware crypto drivers expose the /dev/crypto interface. This is not used by newer hardware or software any more.
Thermal Sensors
Hardware	Select between No/ACPI thermal sensor driver and processor-specific drivers.
Periodic Backups
Periodic RRD Backup	Periodically backup Round Robin Database.
Periodic DHCP Leases Backup	Periodically backup DHCP leases.
Periodic NetFlow Backup	Periodically backup Netflow state.
Periodic Captive Portal Backup	Periodically backup Captive Portal state.
Power Savings
Use PowerD	PowerD allows tweaking power conservation features. The modes are maximum (high performance), minimum (maximum power saving), adaptive (balanced), hiadaptive (balanced, but with higher performance).
On AC Power Mode
On Battery Power Mode
On Normal Power Mode
Disk / Memory Settings
Swap file	Create a 2 GB swap file. This can increase performance, at the cost of increased wear on storage, especially flash.
/var RAM disk	This can be useful to avoid wearing out flash storage. Everything in /var, including logs will be lost upon reboot.
/tmp RAM disk	See above.
System Sounds
Disable the startup/shutdown beep	Disable beeps via the built-in speaker (“PC Speaker”)

Logging

Log settings can be found at System ‣ Settings ‣ Logging.

An overview of the local settings:

Setting	Explanation
Disable circular logs	Disable legacy circular logging and switch to regular file logging
GUI Log Entries to Display	Number of log entries displayed in the GUI.
Log File Size (Bytes)	(circular logs) Maximum size of circular logs (which most OPNsense log files are)
Preserve logs (Days)	(when circular logs are disabled) configures the number of days to keep logs.
Log Firewall Default Blocks	Turning these off means that only hits for your custom rules will be logged.
Web Server Log	If checked, lighttpd errors are displayed in the main system log.
Disable writing log files to the local disk	Useful to avoid wearing out flash memory (if used). Remote logging can be used to save the logs instead if desired.
Reset Logs	Clear all logs. Note that this will also restart the DHCP server, so make sure any DHCP settings are saved first.

Note

Switching from legacy circular logs to regular log files doesn’t remove stored data, but regular files will always be considered more recent. If for some reason you want to switch back to clog, we advice to remove all logs to avoid older entries being sorted on top of the views. When possible we advise to reset logs after each switch.

Circular Logs

Most of the core features support writing to circular log files so they will not grow bigger than a predefined size. You can tune this value via System ‣ Settings ‣ Logging. There, you can also disable the writing of logs to disk or reset them all.

You can view the contents via CLI with:

clog /path/to/log

or follow the contents via:

clog -f /path/to/log

Note

If you can avoid the use of circular logs we strongly advise to do so, the clog path is longer than the direct file path and therefor is more expensive in terms of computing power. In the long run clog support will be dropped, it’s not a native FreeBSD syslog feature (and requires backporting).

Local (non circular) logs

As of OPNsense 20.7 we will change our default logging method from circular logs to regular files. These files will use the following pattern on disk /var/log/<application>/<application>_[YYYYMMDD].log (one file per day). Our user interface provides an integrated view stitching all collected files together.

Plugin Logs

Many plugins have their own logs. In the UI, they are grouped with the settings of that plugin. They mostly log to /var/log/ in text format, so you can view or follow them with tail.

Logging / targets

With OPNsense version 19.7, syslog-ng for remote logging was introduced. If you want to benefit from all new features and already have the legacy system available, please remove all remote logging from System->Settings->Logging and go to System->Settings->Logging / targets and Add a new Destination.

Setting	Explanation
Enabled	Master on/off switch.
Transport	Protocol to use for syslog.
Applications	Select a list of applications to send to remote syslog. Leave empty for all.
Levels	Choose which levels to include, omit to select all.
Facilities	Choose which facilities to include, omit to select all.
Hostname	Hostname or IP address where to send logs to.
Port	Port to use, usually 514.
Description	Set a description for you own use.