Elbennit

Last year I wrote an article about pfSense® titled, " pfSense Makes Good Sense!!! ." While writing that article and creating the accompanying video, I promise to show how I did it. There are plenty of tutorials for creating an open source router / firewall so, what I will do here is show you how I used those tutorials / how-to(s) to create my FOSS router/firewall.

First, I had to purchase a few items to complete the task. I needed a second NIC for an older machine thus it would have to support regular PCI and not PCI Express . Now, that took a bit of hunting but I really recommend eBay for all your retro hardware purchases and to just find a great deal on just about anything. Next, I needed a new switch to network my PCs. Last, I needed wifi support so, I purchase a Cisco®/Linksys® wireless router. Now, my home network would not be on the ATT® Uverse® modem/router/switch/cablebox/telephony equipment, instead it is sitting behind a FOSS firewall/router that I built! How cool is that?

I installed the NIC into the older machine that had an Intel® Celeron® CPU 2.40GH, 20 gig HDD, and 1 gig of RAM that I also upgraded. Now, I really tried using this equipment as a desktop production machine, and it was dismally slow. But as a firewall/router it is perfect! Most of the open source projects for firewalls / routers requires very low hardware specification. As a side note, the more expensive router / firewall equipment uses a proprietary port of UNIX or GNU/Linux to power their equipment. Thus, it just make good sense to use an open source solution to build your own router / firewall home equipment.

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Choosing any of these FOSS projects should improve your home networking experience. Finding these projects all grew out of the desire to install a PXE server on my home network. Thanks, AT&T® Uverse® for not supporting PXE in your modem, because I would have never started Googling for a better solution. This video is a bit long since I demostrateded both SmoothWall® and pfSense in VirtualBox . The setups for the two systems are quite different with SmoothWall® being the more difficult install, but it sure does not lack on features. It took a bit of perseverance to get it installed but the effort was well worth the wait. I plan on make my first truly outlined step by step HowTo on setting up SmoothWall® in a virtual network environment. I hope that this article and the video below will be of service in helping you create your very own FOSS Router / Firewall too!!!

After viewing Smoothwall® OpenWRT ®, M0n0Wall ®, and DD-WRT® , I decided to go with pfSense® on my home network. Separating my home network from my Internet modem was one of the all time best tech upgrades I have completed. I highly recommend this for any power user that want to do more than browse the Internet, check email, and write an occasional letter. If you want to create a media server, PXE server, game server, have more control of dhcp proxy server and firewall settings then, this is the way to go!



















Be Blessed!!!





Elbennit





Be Blessed!!!Elbennit