ddaenen1
Very Senior Member
Well, i have experience with an RT-AC88U as my main router (for many years), Ubiquiti Edgerouter Lite 3, Mikrotik RB2011 and RB3011 and now pfsense (for only a couple of weeks but intensively worked with it). When my network in the house was as simple as everybody having internet access and having a network repository (read: Windows PC) to save some personal stuff on, the RT-AC88U was great and pretty reliable (except with the issue with 5-8 port dropping).
However, as more things came into play, increasing the complexity of my network such as better wifi coverage needed throughout the house, increased number of devices on the network, Windows PC replaced by NAS, the Asus became increasingly less reliable. More freezes and reboots, decreased speed throughput, wifi drop-offs so i went to search for a more reliable solution which which quickly brought me to a wired router/switch combo. After reading alot around it, i bought an ERL3 and a Netgear switch. The ERL3 had a very steep learning curve and i never really got the hang of it. Partially because the GUI/CLI combo to get everything set up properly and partially due to my lack of understanding and knowledge.
The RB2011 that i picked up almost for free offered a much better setting up experience than the ERL3. I had this set up in no time and it worked great and rockstable. The only issue with it was that is wouldn't support 1Gbps throughput and since i was planning to upgrade my ISP subscription, i picked up an RB3011 that could do that. I ran the RB3011 for about a year without any issues except getting IPv6 running but it turned out lateron, this was an ISP-side issue. It is only recently when looking at solutions to get secure external access to my Nextcloud server, that pfsense came into play as it offered several solutions to set up let's encrypt certificates and a reverse proxy. Something that i could also do directly on the server but that would add complexity to the installation on FreeNAS.
After an extensive offline testing period on an old Supermicro server, i moved pfsense over to a Dell R210 server and started setting up the ACME certificate generation which caused some issues that were related to the guide i used but the guide publisher helped me out and once i got this up and running i move pfsense into my network which happened end of last week and was virtually flawless. Installed and configured HAProxy as reverse proxy over the weekend and now have secure access to my Nextcloud.
Now in the process of migrating everything and re-linking devices as i had to change the IP addresses of a number of fixed devices to move them out of the DHCP range as pfsense is in some aspects different from RouterOS as you cannot have static mapping within DHCP range but all in all, up until now, my experience with pfsense is extremely positive. It is fast (i literally notice a difference in network responsiveness and speed) and flexible with a bunch of usable features and the ability to be future-proof for quite some time. I reckon with the current setup, i would only need to add a dual 10Gbps NIC to be good for a very long time.
Sorry for the long text but considering the different opinions above, i wanted to provide my insights.
However, as more things came into play, increasing the complexity of my network such as better wifi coverage needed throughout the house, increased number of devices on the network, Windows PC replaced by NAS, the Asus became increasingly less reliable. More freezes and reboots, decreased speed throughput, wifi drop-offs so i went to search for a more reliable solution which which quickly brought me to a wired router/switch combo. After reading alot around it, i bought an ERL3 and a Netgear switch. The ERL3 had a very steep learning curve and i never really got the hang of it. Partially because the GUI/CLI combo to get everything set up properly and partially due to my lack of understanding and knowledge.
The RB2011 that i picked up almost for free offered a much better setting up experience than the ERL3. I had this set up in no time and it worked great and rockstable. The only issue with it was that is wouldn't support 1Gbps throughput and since i was planning to upgrade my ISP subscription, i picked up an RB3011 that could do that. I ran the RB3011 for about a year without any issues except getting IPv6 running but it turned out lateron, this was an ISP-side issue. It is only recently when looking at solutions to get secure external access to my Nextcloud server, that pfsense came into play as it offered several solutions to set up let's encrypt certificates and a reverse proxy. Something that i could also do directly on the server but that would add complexity to the installation on FreeNAS.
After an extensive offline testing period on an old Supermicro server, i moved pfsense over to a Dell R210 server and started setting up the ACME certificate generation which caused some issues that were related to the guide i used but the guide publisher helped me out and once i got this up and running i move pfsense into my network which happened end of last week and was virtually flawless. Installed and configured HAProxy as reverse proxy over the weekend and now have secure access to my Nextcloud.
Now in the process of migrating everything and re-linking devices as i had to change the IP addresses of a number of fixed devices to move them out of the DHCP range as pfsense is in some aspects different from RouterOS as you cannot have static mapping within DHCP range but all in all, up until now, my experience with pfsense is extremely positive. It is fast (i literally notice a difference in network responsiveness and speed) and flexible with a bunch of usable features and the ability to be future-proof for quite some time. I reckon with the current setup, i would only need to add a dual 10Gbps NIC to be good for a very long time.
Sorry for the long text but considering the different opinions above, i wanted to provide my insights.
