this is potentially my new router I've been meaning to try out pfSense and
there's actually a couple other DIY make
an old computer your router os's um but
I'll be I'll be trying pfSense first cuz it seems to be the most common one and
uh so I'm using an old computer this is an Intel 965 board I've got a Pentium 4
630 in there or something like that 4 gigs of old ocz check this out this the
part number is Vista upgrade RAM nice um 80 plus bronze power supply
for efficiency a little SSD for silence
and efficiency I mean the Pentium 4 will have to be replaced if this works in all
likelihood but I just wanted to whip something together so I could try it out
I'm going to be using this optical drive right here for the OS install here's the
pfSense OS disc I've got a couple of uh
well I've got one Intel Nick and I think I had another one somewhere and then I
have also because it's an INT board it does use Intel networking for its
onboard so I have the 1 GB Port there as well and then I'll be using just a uh
nit gear switch to do all my gigabit switching and then I found out of my
three wireless cards this one is the one that has a compatible chipset where
there are drivers for the pfSense OS so I'll be trying the release candidate uh
one for the new version 2.0 of the software and let's see how this goes I'm
going to get this started my Razer Naga Mouse uh had to unplug it it's causing
some kind of error to do with the LEDs lighting up or something along those
lines so I'm now in the installer mode I
had to connect an IDE optical drive in order to install it
this old motherboard won't boot from USB Optical very elegantly so uh H here we
go never done this
before okay why don't we just accept these settings let's do a quick easy
install uh yeah we can erase all the contents to this disc here it goes guys
okay so I had some instructions before it rebooted to put in
192.168.1.1 uh username admin password pfSense so I got to do that it's asking
me now this is on first boot shows me my network interfaces it doesn't seem to be
picking up the uh the one built into the motherboard so it's possible that that's
not going to work for me uh do not want to set up V
lens if you do not have at least one interface you cannot continue if you not
have at least one real network interface card or one interface with multiple
vlans then pfSense will not function
correctly if you do not know the names of your interface you may choose to use
Auto detection in that case disconnect all interfaces now before hitting a to
initi initiate Auto detection I
should okay Auto detection
time all right I guess I better go plug in my
uh I guess I go better plug in my modem
so a few changes have been made I'm going to actually move over to the other
room so that I can plug the Lan interface into my network switch and the
uh when interface into to my router the
router one seems to be working so far but I haven't had a chance to uh here
are my two Intel Pro 100s desktop
adapters so I haven't had a chance to uh to plug the Lan one in because I don't
have two cables running into this room I've also removed one of the wireless
cards because since the onboard networking did not work with pfSense I
had to put in the additional um wired Network Port card so let's see how this
goes okay so I think I figured out the configur stage of things here uh
basically I assigned interfaces so I assigned my interfaces to the wide area
Network and local area network I set the interface IP addresses so I Set My Lan
one to kind of a standard router IP address and then
um I also had to set starting and ending ranges for the DHCP server which will
assign IP addresses to all of the computers on my network so right now I
still have uh my PC the Home Server a
couple other or one other PC in the
house connected to my router here but I'm actually I've got my pfSense
router connected to my network switch there so I'm going to be using that to
test a couple other computers including this notebook that I've hooked up to
find out if this works so actually I
guess you guys can find out real time what's going on
here whether it works or whether it does
not okay actually I might need a minute okay so it works it looks like I have
logged in from user admin from 192168
1.11 which is The Notebook that I've connected to my network switch right
here so I have internet access and I
have logged into the pfSense web interface so I'm pretty much done on
this side as far as I can tell and uh I
have never used this before so I'm not even going to begin to try and talk
about how to use it but but um yeah I
mean why don't we do a little exploring just right off the bat here to have a
look at what we got here so we got CPU usage memory usage which I would have
expected to be quite low uh we've got the platform we're running here's
version 2.0 rc1 which is what I am using okay here's my interfaces which I
set up already in the command line interface systemer manager firmware
General setup logo now my understanding is it's a
little on the complicated side for networking new noobs which I am one of
so yeah we're not even going to try and begin to explore this right now but I'm
hoping to be able to figure out how to use it and then maybe I'll be able to
provide an update for you guys thank you for checking out this
little um exploration episode of lineus
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