I have a router on the 192.168.1.0 network and that’s my whole home network.
Now i want to make a pfsense router just for myself.
So a cable from the home router to the pfsense router and then the pfsense router connects to my pc and nas and acts as a wireless AP.
The purpose of this is that i want to use squid.
But how do i set up Pfsense so that this works?
what should i do with the wan adress? and lan?
it’s really confusing me.
Is there a tutorial somewhere to use a pfsense box within an existing network without altering the already existing network?
Connect your WAN interface to your existing network and give it an IP address within your existing subnet (192.168.1.0/24) or let it get an address via DHCP. If you want to use the pfsense box for wifi (it's not great but you can do it) the easiest way to do it is to create a bridge interface with the wireless card and the NIC you want to use for LAN and then use that bridge interface as your LAN interface.
You can also have the wireless as a separate interface on a separate network but bridging is probably more suitable for a home environment.
Configure the LAN interface with a subnet which is different to the one of the rest of your network, so 192.168.2.0/24 or 10.0.0.0/24 or whatever, just has to be different. I can't remember off the top of my head if DHCP is enabled by default but you should probably have a look at the DHCP options and set that up for the LAN interface. It should work after that.
If you have any specific questions about how to set it up I can probably help you with it.
I'll just mention, that if you're doing this for something to learn and play around with that's great, but setting up squid for just one machine (or even a small number of machines) will not give you any performance improvement, in fact you will probably get less performance. So it's going to be a lot of work with no real gain. Just letting you know.
ah some clarity, thank you so much. I won't have much time the upcoming days to play around with it but i'll sure try it out.
connect the WAN (nic) to the home router (HR). disable DHCP on the pfsense router WAN (PFR)
Set WAN ip on PFR to 192.168.1.120 (for example) Set LAN ip on PFR to 192.168.2.1 and enable DHCP on LAN (nic)(on wich my pc is connected) Setup an AP bridged with LAN for WiFi.
(optional) have a second NIC bridged with LAN(nic)? to connect a nas to?
Mess around with squid. yes i-am indeed just doing this to play around with it and see how maybe some websites load faster or something..... ;) I-am also curious to set up firewalls and security and stuff to learn something extra.
The WAN interface won't have any DHCP options so you don't have to do this.
Yeah pretty much. You'll be better off using a switch to connect everything to the pfsense box but bridging a bunch of NICs will work too, but it may not perform as well. Just make sure to assign the bridge as the LAN interface.
So when you first set it up you'll have a NIC assigned to the LAN interface, you can get it set up with that. Then create the bridge interface and assign that to the LAN interface. I haven't done this myself but it should work fine.
Your browser already has a cache so the only difference you're likely to notice is a delay before page loads, but have fun with it either way :P