Im new to pfsense and freebsd but familiar with a few of the other oses including linux (to an extent), but I am having trouble getting this setup... basically i am planning to try out using a laptop as a router but i would like to set this up FIRST before i connect to my modem and it only has a single eth port so i need to be able to connect through the wlan adapter with that said, i havent been able to figure out how to set the wlan connection to broadcast an SSID once i can connect with a seperate machine i should be able to use the webgui and i am sure that will be fairly straightforward, at least to get the ball rolling anyway, but i am stuck here if i had an eth1 port i realize that i could connect through it, and i also realize that i could buy another adapter to have that capability but i would rather not at this point im a bit stuck....i had eth0 (re0) assigned to WAN and wlan0 (ral0) assigned to LAN but i am unsure if that was correct i had an IP address assigned to the wlan connection and nothing assigned to eth0
any suggestions? and yes the hardware IS supported, I looked into that and both interfaces are showing up without a problem, i am 99% sure that this is my naivety with regards to networking and freebsd rather than hardware and i have yet to find a how-to or tutorial to solve this for that matter is there a file that i can use VI to edit that may sort this out manually through the shell?
Set the wlan as wan (or any other spare interfaces of they exist) so you can use the wired port for lan, then you can connect another computer to it and configure it. If you juggle it around a little you should be able to swap the wlan in for lan and after you connect to that put the wired nic back as wan.
Alternatively buy a cheap usb network adapter and use that to help set it up, but basically there is no way to configure the wireless network outside of the gui (no easy way anyway)
It can be tricky as there's no way to save changes and apply later, so you can get stuck in a situation where you lock yourself out. But you can always use the console to assign the interfaces again. Having a third interface of any kind will be helpful for juggling everything, maybe once you get in to the webui set up a vpn (done sent need to actually work) and then you will be able to assign that to wan so you can get the wlan working properly, then once you can connect to wlan you can set the wired interface back to wan and delete the VPN interface.
Actually I'm over complicating this. All you need to do is set the wlan interface to wan and the wired to lan, then go to the firewall rules and make an allow any to any rule on the wan interface (make sure you delete this rule later when you connect it to the internet). Then set the wired interface back to wan and the wlan interface to lan and you should be able to plug your computer in and access the webui via the wan interface, then you can set up the wireless without having to juggle interfaces too much.
so i did as you mentioned and was able to get into the webconfig, then after setting up an SSID and WPA2 and making it an access point i went back to the console and re-assigned the interfaces, swapping them. that allowed me to get back into the webui after connecting to the new network that it created...oddly though it dropped the WPA2 security but i just did that again so something didnt apply properly i guess, but I am unsure why
next problem is that it is only allowing me to choose b and g and not n so its very possible that in fact the wifi isnt fully supported....checking into that now so, fingers crossed