So I just acquired my room-mates old computer and I'd like to turn in into one of those badass routers described in an old TekSyndicate video. I'm wondering though what kind of expansion card I need to PROVIDE a wireless network to my house? Should I invest and try to get something dual band to get that 5 Ghz channel? And do I need a seperate expansion card for ethernet ports? I do like to wire in my hardware rather than have it all be wireless.
Any help is appreciated :) Thanks guys!
People keep getting routers confused with access points. pfsense is a great router, but it isn't great for wi-fi, it doesn't support 802.11n or anything newer so you'll still need an access point for wi-fi. as for ethernet ports you need atleast two, one for the WAN connection and one for the LAN. you would only have more ports if you had more than one LAN or WAN. to connect multiple devices you would use a switch, not more ethernet ports.
Old tek vid >> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0JFfpG4BWI
Although as said above, you may be a little confused about things. Read up a little on home networking perhaps.
I've only ever used pfSense for its load balancing ability. Something feels wrong about using a PC as a router... pfSense especially can't handle a lot of traffic.
I think a lot of people get confused because the modem/router you get from your ISP typically has switchports and uses a virtual interface, hence why the WLAN interface can be on the same subnet as the switchports.
What do you consider a lot of traffic? Last I knew, the stack could handle at least 10Gb throughput. So for most home applications, pfsense should be able to handle any load you can throw at it, so long as the hardware you use is up to the task. For example, my connection (a paltry 25Mb) could be handled easily by an old pentium 3 with 512mb of ram and a couple decent 10/100 nics. In fact, that set up should be able to handle connections twice as fast as mine, probably more without any problem.
So I'm curious exactly what you mean when you say it can't handle a lot of traffic? I mean, we're talking home use here after all, so unless you're hosting a popular web server (or do an insane amount of torrenting) on a beefy fiber connection or something out of your home, I don't see the problem.
You can put the WLAN on the same subnet as the LAN with pfsense, my point is that pfsense is a router, not an access point, it's not made for wireless. People seem to think that router means wi-fi. A router if for connecting two or more networks together, so for home use this usually means connecting your local network to the internet.
Pfsense can handle plenty of traffic, and it can handle a lot of open connections, much more so than a normal consumer router. This for me is the biggest advantage of it and why I will never go back to using a standard router. I have multiple networks which are all routed by pfsense and I can get full gigabit speed between them, so I don't see why it would have any problem with an internet connection.
Like Dexter Kane said, you're confusing some things. You wont use a Pfsense box for wireless or as a switch. It's just a firewall/router (though, some people use them as a file server as well). For you, the best setup would be as follows:
excuse the quickie diagram lol. Also, if you don't want to buy a wireless access point, you can often use your existing wireless router as an access point with a little tweaking. Hope that helps a bit.
I was going by the following note on their website saying commodity hardware is limited to 3Gbit/sec for routing (https://www.pfsense.org/about-pfsense/common-deployments.html#router) which, actually, is still pretty high in terms of home usage. My bad.
+1, good post Ranger
The number one thing people get confused about with routers is that they are all one device. They're not. A cheap router like you buy at Target or Walmart is actually several devices crammed into one case. The router part actually does the moving of packets, but there are other parts to it.
DHCP server-without a DHCP server on a network, you have to set IPs and DNS and subnets manually on every PC. So 99% of home networks have DHCP on their router.
Switch-this is the 4 LAN ports on the back of the router.
2 network interfaces-one connects to your cable modem, one connects to your switch to do your LAN. This is why you need 2 network cards for a pfsense box
access point-this is best thought of as a wireless switch. it allows multiple clients to connect to the LAN interface via wireless.
Ok I have a stupid issue with my PFsense box. Whenever I upload an ISO to my virtualization server, all other network functions completely freeze. I added a load balancing rule in there to limit the bandwidth going to the server's IP, but that's not ideal because it is a server, so does anyone have any ideas? I thought maybe it was just my NIC, they are just two little crappy 100mbps NICs, who knows how old they are, I got em used. I was gonna upgrade to better NICs soon, but is there anything I can do about this?
