I'm moving in february and would like to stop using a router and set up a pfSense box. Sadly I don't have any old PC's anymore to set this up. Is there a complete pfSense Box I could buy or do I have to buy (mobo, ram, psu, case etc) parts to make a new one?
And the other thing is that I'd like to make a nas for my home network. Could I integrate that in the pfSense Box?
jsyk There isn't really a high budget in my pocket for this, but I have 4xWD Red 3TB laying around.
thanks for every answer in advance :) best regards
First, you have 4 3TB REDs lying around and you have no budget?????? LOL XD
But you can use a second hand computer from ebay to do the job. If that doesn't work go for a Mini-ATX board with 2 Intel Pro 1000 nics and a Celeron or Pentium with 2 or 4 gigs of memory. And a 16 GB SSD( or at least the smallest you can find).
For the NAS you can use for example a Synology NAS if you dont have a budget to buy a RAID card. If you don't mind that you can build a pc just like the router i explaned and create a Hardware RAID and read it out an share it with FREENAS.
In general, I would not recommend using the same piece of hardware as both a router and a server. Any future hardware failure would effect both systems, and future hardware maintenance would require downtime for both as well.
For the file server, you could go with FreeNAS like Gamebase mentioned. The ZFS file system is very robust and has tons of features. Also, you would not need a raid card at all, just add the 3 drives to 3 sata ports on a system and set up a ZFS pool in FreeNAS. You could set up a cheap USB stick inside the case to run FreeNAS.
As for a PFSense box, you could build your own, or buy an Alix bundle from eBay as mentioned in the below Tek Syndicate video. Also, you could use your existing router as a wireless AP, or add a wifi card to the PFSense box.