Hey guys! I'm currently moving into a new house. And the old owners gave me their old computer. It's an old peace of machinery from an old age. It has a pretty decent (An intel Celeron D 325, if my memory serves) CPU and 512 MB of RAM. So, it's certainly not a PC for me. Though, for some time, I've been wanting to make a router/backup server as well as a VPN conduit. So, essentially, it would act as a router, a backup server (It would backup files from all the computers in the house to it's hard drives every night ) and provide all the connected devices with VPN service.
Though, one thing I wonder is if this computer will be fast enough. It has to backup quite a lot of files. So, maybe it would be good enough for as a router. But, I doubt it would work well as a home backup server. So, first question, is it strong enough?
Also, if it is, how would one turn it into a router. I watched Logan's video about PFsense. But, I wonder how you can put a VPN in pfsense. Also, I doubt you can provide backup functionnality with pfsense installed. What I was thinking would be Linux. But I'll definitely have to do a lot of googling and youtubing before knowing what to do.
Anyways, any assistance is greatly appreciated. Have a good evening!
I'll get my friend skullabyss on hthis, he's pretty damn good with networking stuff
Well, PFSense has a OpenVPN option that you can use. I don't know how it works though, but you might be able to find into somewhere on the PFSense Forums. As for the router part, you could turn your laptop into a Wifi-Hotspot, but it is a pain to get Wifi Setup on PfSense from my personal experiance. As for backing stuff up using PFSense, haven't found a way to do that. Do you have any old computers laying around?
Yeah, the old owner of the house I'm moving into gave me his old desktop computer. It's a dinosaur compared to our computers. But, it's still good enough for a router. I'm trying to find the right programs for me to have all those functions. Would linux be a possible platform? As you said, PFsense could be a pain for me. Is there any other platforms apart from linux or PFsense?
It is sufficient to backup data with. Pickup a decent RAID card and a few drives. You could get something along the lines of an LSI made adapter and a couple WD red hard disks for in the range of <$300.
Ok good to know. I was thinking I would probably be forced to buy a better CPU. But, a RAID card should take care of the processing needs. Now to see how I can put all of that together so that all three functionnalities work.