I upgraded my internet connection to 1Gbs, after a speedtest it seemed that the old hardware, could not cope with that kind of speeds. It got stuck at 600Mbps.

The old hardware is a J1900 board with 4 1Gbs ethernet connections, the new hardware is an Intel N6005 with 4 2.5Gbs connections. The processor was the bottleneck, it could not keep up with the new speed.

Before you do anything: update the old hardware to the newest version (at the time of writeing 22.7_4) and backup the configuration to a pc that will also use to initially connect to the new firewall hardware. Make a note of the interface names, in my case em0..em3 and make a list of your used plugins, and that its configuration is in your backup.

Next, install the same version of Opnsense on to the new hardware. I did this by inserting the local LAN cable into the new WAN port. This so you have an internet connectoin to install my used plugins. Also make a note of the interface new names, in my case igc0..igc3.

Find and replace em0 -> igc0 .. em3 -> igc3. Watch out when replacing stuff, not to replace values in the “binary” fields in the data (the key data etc).

This new configuiration has to be uploaded to the new hardware, after this is done check if everything is ok. If so, you are ready to replace the old hardware with the new hardware, make sure all network cables are in the right position (what was plugged into em0 should now be in igc0 etc). After this is complete, you can power on the new hardware.

The proof of the pudding is that you have a working internet connection and no complaining house members :-D

If you have a vpn configured, you may check your connection to make sure al cypher material is correct migrated to the new hardware.