Home

I've heard approximately pfSense for years, however it usually struck me as over my head, too complicated for me, too much of a hassle. I'm happy to mention I became incorrect. The setup manner is virtually simply clean. Even although you may use the command line for a number of it, you may not have to do something a lot extra complicated than typing Y(es) or N(o).

If you've got ever mucked round with a router interface in any respect, you could in all likelihood take care of pfSense. Here's a honest setup walkthrough from Netgate, the agency networking enterprise that makes pfSense.

After analyzing up on pfSense, I found out that it appeared quite clean to put in, and the mini-ITX PC I had will be a long way extra powerful than my existing router. Replacing my wireless router would additionally permit me reposition it as an get right of entry to factor in a extra vital place in my residence, faraway from the modem and network switch that are caught in a corner of the storage (in which the cellphone line enters the residence). In the future, I may additionally even ditch this wi-fi router and make my own mesh wireless community with wireless get right of entry to factors from a organization like Ubiquiti.

In the mini-ITX PC I recently built, which uses the superb compact NCase M1 case, I swapped out some elements. I found an unused i5-6500 CPU and motherboard and hooked up them, together with 16GB of DDR4 RAM (2-4x more than I really want, oops) and a downgrade to a 256GB SSD (approximately 250GB extra than I really need, oops).

Then I brought the important thing factor: an Intel 4-port network card within the PCIe slot, because you want at the least network ports: One for the net connection entering the router, and one to supply your local network, or LAN. On the advice of pfSense users, I grabbed a used company card on Ebay, an HP NC364T, for $20.

I put the pfSense installer on a flash force with Rufus, an essential loose device. Installation went mostly smoothly, although I spent approximately 5 minutes burdened through how to get the SSD to format properly (if you're the use of a clean pressure that does not already have Windows or walls on it, you in all likelihood won't have this hassle). The interface makes this a part of the installation honestly easy.

Finally there's the element that appears a touch frightening, but certainly is not. It's just asking you to pick out which ports for your card are getting used for which cables. You simply hit "a" for automated with the cables unplugged, then plug in whichever cable it asks you for, and it's going to do the rest.

That's all you need to do at the command line. From that factor ahead, you get to use the browser interface, which is a supercharged model of the router interfaces you've likely used earlier than. router login It's massively more feature rich, helps you to install tons of plugins, see awesome distinct logs and charts of your statistics usage, and it's all manner faster than a slow router interface.

I made a couple rookie mistakes for the duration of this setup that slowed me down, however didn't take too long to solve:I first of all attempted to connect to the browser interface by plugging my laptop into one of the extra ports (the 2 now not assigned to WAN or LAN). This turned into silly, due to the fact no site visitors changed into being directed to those ports. I figured that out quick.

I permit pfSense use its default gateway cope with, 192.168.1.1, after which I plugged in my modem earlier than configuring it, which additionally uses 192.168.1.X. I suppose this confused the entire setup and I wasn't positive the way to restoration it. After some fruitless tinkering I unplugged the modem, rebooted the pfSense router, and became capable of login to the internet interface and configure it with a exclusive deal with (I like 10.Zero.0.1). After that I had no troubles in any respect.Advertisement

If even those things above sound difficult to troubleshoot to you, that shouldn't turn you off trying pfSense! That's because resources for figuring out small problems like these are considerable. PfSense has a whole lot of dedicated users, many of whom recognize and care loads about networking