BeachBum
Regular Contributor
You may have seen my other thread on new home construction network info. For my firewall/router I decided to go the home built route and use pfSense as the OS. Below are the build specs, its up and running and working well so far. The basic pfSense setup out of the box was more or less simple, I watched Mark Furneaux's excellent video series before I started.
Supermicro A1SRi-2758f
16gb Kingston DDR3 ECC 1600 RAM
Samsung 850 EVO 120gb SATA III SSD
Mini-Box M350 enclosure Kit (includes 150w picoPSU)
Evercool EC4015SH12BP 40mm x 40mm x1 5mm fan (x2)
While we are temporarily displaced the network I have is all wifi, there are no hard wire connections. So I have my previous main ASUS AC3200 router running in Wireless AP mode and plugged directly in to the LAN nic. All devices are connecting well and I haven't seen any issues so far. Once we get into our home I will be adding a managed switch inline after this pfSense box. There will be 2 wireless AP's for wifi as well.
pfSense has a bit of a steep learning curve compared to the ASUS firmware, so I haven't got to all the advanced stuff yet. Next I will learn and setup the VPN as I need it. Then comes the UTM stuff; Snort, pfBlockerNG, etc.. as well as some sort of parental control and A/V packages.
If things don't work out with pfSense I still am keeping in mind the Sophos Home UTM, although the lack of OpenVPN worries me. I tested out pfSense in a VirtualBox machine before actually using it on my router, but I haven't been able to get the Sophos UTM to work that way. If someone has experience with that please let me know.
Anyway, thought you all might be interested in a report...
Supermicro A1SRi-2758f
16gb Kingston DDR3 ECC 1600 RAM
Samsung 850 EVO 120gb SATA III SSD
Mini-Box M350 enclosure Kit (includes 150w picoPSU)
Evercool EC4015SH12BP 40mm x 40mm x1 5mm fan (x2)
While we are temporarily displaced the network I have is all wifi, there are no hard wire connections. So I have my previous main ASUS AC3200 router running in Wireless AP mode and plugged directly in to the LAN nic. All devices are connecting well and I haven't seen any issues so far. Once we get into our home I will be adding a managed switch inline after this pfSense box. There will be 2 wireless AP's for wifi as well.
pfSense has a bit of a steep learning curve compared to the ASUS firmware, so I haven't got to all the advanced stuff yet. Next I will learn and setup the VPN as I need it. Then comes the UTM stuff; Snort, pfBlockerNG, etc.. as well as some sort of parental control and A/V packages.
If things don't work out with pfSense I still am keeping in mind the Sophos Home UTM, although the lack of OpenVPN worries me. I tested out pfSense in a VirtualBox machine before actually using it on my router, but I haven't been able to get the Sophos UTM to work that way. If someone has experience with that please let me know.
Anyway, thought you all might be interested in a report...
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