Pfsence in freenas?

i have a pc with a pentium E2180 currently running freenas 11.2 is i have a supper crappy router and have a couple intel nic cads laying around given that my router seem utterly incapable of handling any traffic going through it im wondering if i can run a pfsence and freenas in one machine with the added network card and have the router as a dedicated access point since most of my internet connections are throgh ethernet this is a home setup other than data integrity on the nas it is not mission critical.

If you search on YouTube Lawrence Technology Services, they do this in several videos as well as speak to the challenges.
One problem with this is your router, and therefore your internet, stops when your server goes down.

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It would make more sense to use a Hypervisor like ESXi and then have FreeNAS run in a VM and pfsense run in a VM too. It’s more involved, but it’s how I’d setup a system.

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wouldn’t that mess up the ZFS file system by not allowing direct access to drives?

Passthough a hardware controller, like a JBOD controller, to solve that problem.

I’m doing exactly as @FurryJackman has stated. Running FreeNAS and pfSense as VMs with an HBA passed through to the FreeNAS VM. Both work without issue. You could also passthough your spare NIC to the pfSense VM as well, and it will also work.