firewalla VS DietPi

firewalla is open source https://github.com/firewalla/firewalla

Just to follow up because I think I misread OP—they’re looking at Firewalla who publishes their source on github, and it looks a lot like your classic FOSS firewall running suricata and probably doing DNS-based filtering. I bet if you dig into their source you’ll find dnscryptproxy, unbound, or dnsmasq with filter sets.

Using the Firewalla VPN Client for a 3rd party connection is one way. What this means is that devices on your network can initiate connections through the VPN to external addresses, and those external addresses can respond and make use of the established connection (ex: your machine uses a browser to request the webpage https://help.firewalla.com through the vpn connection, and the server hosting the webpage receives the request and is able to respond, by sending the requested webpage)

search https://help.firewalla.com you will find more articles on this topic. And if not, the communitly likely have more https://help.firewalla.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/360001948014-Expanding-Firewalla-Docker-Third-Party-Apps-Scripts-

there are a few threads https://help.firewalla.com like this https://help.firewalla.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/4411622449811-Omada-Controller-Docker

From my understanding zeek does the inspection (probably not https / tls ) and generates alerts (internally) which Firewallas software (https://github.com/firewalla/firewalla) picks up and analyses then throws out alerts / blocks as they see fit.

Technically yes, but also maybe no. Firewalla's software is open source. You can download and modify it on GitHub. If you really wanted to, you could fork it and strip out all of the firewalla-specific code (ie licensing, app integration, etc.) and replace it with your own code.

DietPi is a lightweight Debian based Linux distribution for SBCs and server systems, with the option to install desktop environments, too. It ships as minimal image but allows to install complete and ready-to-use software stacks with a set of console based shell dialogs and scripts.

The source code is hosted on GitHub: https://github.com/MichaIng/DietPi

That's a good point, but the array of devices supported by the DietPi team is extensive: https://dietpi.com/

Before someone starts the usual yadda yadda about the RPi biger community, the OS not having long time support etc. I would repeat one more time: do not rely on board vendor supplied images; this is valid for pretty much all boards. Just go to Armbian or DietPi pages and you'll almost certainly find one or more images that work on your board and forums to discuss about them with very knowledgeable people.

https://www.armbian.com/download/

https://dietpi.com/#download

Those projects are well worth a contribution, as they don't have a giant like Broadcom behind them.

> bananapi do a lot of boards but their software story has been a bit poor

This is quite common with other board manufacturers too. I'd rather suggest to ignore completely their cobbled together distros, often also tainted by proprietary modifications, that become unmaintained in a few years, and see if they're among the many supported by Armbian or DietPi.

https://www.armbian.com/download/

https://dietpi.com/#download

The full release notes can be found at: https://dietpi.com/docs/releases/v8_25/

RPi OS = diet pi https://dietpi.com/ - initial config via text file - SDcard burning out partially mitigated as writes log files to ram then flushes to SDcard reducing write cycles

You could also try very minimalistic distros like TwisterUI or DietPi which are most known for their use in the RasprebbyPi / SBC computers but which also have editions for desktop / laptop.