New To Pfsense

Hardware Hub Networking
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Hello,

I am planning on diving into pfsense for my home. For the record im pretty good on hardware, been building machines since the early 90’s, but unfortunately not too savvy on networking, so im expecting this journey to be a steep learning curve! :slight_smile:

So i guess my first question is, can one of you guys point me to a good and ‘relatively’ easy to follow guide online? I’ve done some searching around and there’s a lot of articles out there, but which would you recommend personally?

I have some old hardware lying around i’ll try experimenting with, if all goes well, then I’ll be more than happy to upgrade it in the future to something more robust.
If you can also let me know if the following should suffice to get started with?

Gigabyte N3050m-d3p - mobo / soc, only a dual core celery, but i got it new for 17 gbp, so was hoping this would be ok just to play with?
8GB RAM - crucial, bog standard stuff
64GB Transced SSD

I did note than many recommend an Intel nic, so I’ve just ordered a Intel Pro/1000PT 1Gb/s Dual Port NIC x3959 - will this be ok? I wanted to avoid the onboard nic on the mobo so got a dual port NIC, and got this for only 15 pounds.

That’s pretty much it, im assuming the onboard gpu will be fine.

For my home I have my internet with Pulse8, 65/20 going into a Zyxel VMG3925-B VDSL. This is downstairs next to the master socket, i then run cat5e up to a netgear gs208 8 port switch in my computer room. I’ll also want to be adding a NAS at some point for media server using Freenas (another learning curve there!).

I hope that’s enough info? I look forward to your thoughts! If there’s anything that stands out as tragically wrong please let me know :slight_smile:
tia,
Marko

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Everything looks fine, the Celeron N3050 is than enough to get started with pfSense and the Intel NIC should be an improvement over the onboard solution.

As for guides, this video series by Mark Furneaux is a really good resource for getting started with pfSense. It is fairly recent and based on pfSense 2.3.

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Wow, that mobo/CPU supports AES, so it’s even good for pfSense 2.5 when it comes out.
That should be more than enough.

Learn about networking, routing, subnetting, and VPNs and you’ll do fine. Plenty of youtube vids on the subject.

Just don’t waste your time on transparent prpxies… It’s an idea that won’t be of much if any benefit.

Have fun!

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Many thanks for your responses! :slight_smile:

Started with Mark Furneaux’s series, very informative. Unfortunately already hit my first hurdle. I just can’t seem to get IP addresses assigned to both WAN and LAN within pfsense.
I’ve tried every possible combination of both NIC’s on the intel card and the onboard NIC. I’ve tried auto detection, doesn’t detect anything. Tried manually assigning em0 and em1 etc, but only one will ever get an IP address, the other remains blank.
Any ideas? Both NICs on the Intel card are def working, since if I plug the WAN cable into either I can get an IP assigned to it. Same for the LAN, just can’t seem to get both to get working at the same time!

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated,
thanks,
Marko

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Hello,

I did manage ‘once’ to get the LAN and WAN IP addresses assigned to both NIC’s. However, when I then tried to access the PF sense UI through my main rig it wouldn’t respond on the default 192.168.1.1. I then rebooted the pfsense router to see if that would help, and alas, the LAN lost it’s IP address once more… getting very frustrating.
Can any please advise why I can’t get stable IP’s for both WAN and LAN?
For reference, I have the cable from my modem running to NIC 1 (em1), and a cable from my network switch to NIC 0 (em0).
On the only occassion when both had IP addresses allocated by pfsense, the WAN was 192.168.1.100/24, and the LAN had 192.168.1.1/24.

Look forward to hearing your thought,
Many thanks,
Marko

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Seems like the problem is that both interfaces are getting IPs in the same subnet, which won’t work. What you want to do is put your modem/router in to bridge mode so that pfsense is getting an IP from your ISP and not from the modem’s dhcp server.

Alternatively if you just ant to get it working then manually assign an IP to the lan interface which is in a different subnet. You can use 192.168.2.1/24 or 10.1.1.1/24 or anything like that.

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