Personal Project - Trying to Set Up PFSense Part 1 Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,143 words · ~5 min read
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this is potentially my new router I've been meaning to try out pfSense and
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there's actually a couple other DIY make
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an old computer your router os's um but
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I'll be I'll be trying pfSense first cuz it seems to be the most common one and
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uh so I'm using an old computer this is an Intel 965 board I've got a Pentium 4
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630 in there or something like that 4 gigs of old ocz check this out this the
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part number is Vista upgrade RAM nice um 80 plus bronze power supply
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for efficiency a little SSD for silence
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and efficiency I mean the Pentium 4 will have to be replaced if this works in all
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likelihood but I just wanted to whip something together so I could try it out
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I'm going to be using this optical drive right here for the OS install here's the
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pfSense OS disc I've got a couple of uh
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well I've got one Intel Nick and I think I had another one somewhere and then I
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have also because it's an INT board it does use Intel networking for its
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onboard so I have the 1 GB Port there as well and then I'll be using just a uh
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nit gear switch to do all my gigabit switching and then I found out of my
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three wireless cards this one is the one that has a compatible chipset where
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there are drivers for the pfSense OS so I'll be trying the release candidate uh
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one for the new version 2.0 of the software and let's see how this goes I'm
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going to get this started my Razer Naga Mouse uh had to unplug it it's causing
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some kind of error to do with the LEDs lighting up or something along those
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lines so I'm now in the installer mode I
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had to connect an IDE optical drive in order to install it
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this old motherboard won't boot from USB Optical very elegantly so uh H here we
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go never done this
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before okay why don't we just accept these settings let's do a quick easy
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install uh yeah we can erase all the contents to this disc here it goes guys
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okay so I had some instructions before it rebooted to put in
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192.168.1.1 uh username admin password pfSense so I got to do that it's asking
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me now this is on first boot shows me my network interfaces it doesn't seem to be
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picking up the uh the one built into the motherboard so it's possible that that's
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not going to work for me uh do not want to set up V
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lens if you do not have at least one interface you cannot continue if you not
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have at least one real network interface card or one interface with multiple
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vlans then pfSense will not function
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correctly if you do not know the names of your interface you may choose to use
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Auto detection in that case disconnect all interfaces now before hitting a to
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initi initiate Auto detection I
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should okay Auto detection
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time all right I guess I better go plug in my
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uh I guess I go better plug in my modem
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so a few changes have been made I'm going to actually move over to the other
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room so that I can plug the Lan interface into my network switch and the
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uh when interface into to my router the
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router one seems to be working so far but I haven't had a chance to uh here
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are my two Intel Pro 100s desktop
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adapters so I haven't had a chance to uh to plug the Lan one in because I don't
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have two cables running into this room I've also removed one of the wireless
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cards because since the onboard networking did not work with pfSense I
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had to put in the additional um wired Network Port card so let's see how this
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goes okay so I think I figured out the configur stage of things here uh
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basically I assigned interfaces so I assigned my interfaces to the wide area
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Network and local area network I set the interface IP addresses so I Set My Lan
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one to kind of a standard router IP address and then
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um I also had to set starting and ending ranges for the DHCP server which will
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assign IP addresses to all of the computers on my network so right now I
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still have uh my PC the Home Server a
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couple other or one other PC in the
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house connected to my router here but I'm actually I've got my pfSense
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router connected to my network switch there so I'm going to be using that to
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test a couple other computers including this notebook that I've hooked up to
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find out if this works so actually I
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guess you guys can find out real time what's going on
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here whether it works or whether it does
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not okay actually I might need a minute okay so it works it looks like I have
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logged in from user admin from 192168
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1.11 which is The Notebook that I've connected to my network switch right
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here so I have internet access and I
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have logged into the pfSense web interface so I'm pretty much done on
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this side as far as I can tell and uh I
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have never used this before so I'm not even going to begin to try and talk
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about how to use it but but um yeah I
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mean why don't we do a little exploring just right off the bat here to have a
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look at what we got here so we got CPU usage memory usage which I would have
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expected to be quite low uh we've got the platform we're running here's
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version 2.0 rc1 which is what I am using okay here's my interfaces which I
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set up already in the command line interface systemer manager firmware
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General setup logo now my understanding is it's a
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little on the complicated side for networking new noobs which I am one of
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so yeah we're not even going to try and begin to explore this right now but I'm
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hoping to be able to figure out how to use it and then maybe I'll be able to
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provide an update for you guys thank you for checking out this
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little um exploration episode of lineus
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