PFSENSE a DIY Router/Firewall

I have worked with computer networks for 10+ years. I have seen many routers and firewalls for home use. The home networking market is flooded with devices from Linksys, Netgear, Belkin, and Apple. For most users they are fine offering capabilities as wireless access, port forwarding,  Address Translation and basic to intermediate firewalls.  Some of theses devices are good others can be horrible. I have seen many with buggy firmware causing the device to crash, randomly reboot, drop connections, offer poor performance and in fail completely.

I am not saying these devices should be looked down upon or thrown out, I am just giving some examples of what could be wrong with them.

If you are an advance computer user and have a spare computer,  a couple of Network Cards, a switch you can have a powerful home firewall router that can outperform any residential over the counter product.

Today I am talking about PFSENSE. It is a great open source FreeBSD based router/firewall distribution.  It is free and can run on many hardware platforms from an old Pentium Based computer running at 100 MHz with 128MB’s of ram, quad-core computers,  to dedicated embedded solutions. ( For a complete list of hardware requirements check Here). PFSENSE offers a highly customized about routing platform that not only can act as a perimeter firewall or gateway router, you can install packages to add VPN, Network AntiVirus, DHCP Server, DHCP Relay, VOIP SWITCHING, Captive Portal and Wireless capabilities to name a few.

Installation is quite easy. It can be done using a Live CD or installation CD onto a new or used computer or it can be installed over Serial to make a headless appliance. After the installation the software can be configured using its web interface which is similar residential products sold in stores and is very reliable. I have been using PFSENSE for about 5 years now with no issues.

My current PFSENSE build has been working for over a year since I rebuilt it due to upgrading it to new hardware.

• The PFSENSE Box is running:
  • Dual Pentium 3 Processors running at 1GHZ
  • 4 Gigs of  PC133ECC Memory
  • 200 Gig hard Drive
  • 350 Watt Power supply
  • 3 Netgear 10/100/100 Network Cards
• The Services running.
  • NAT
  • DHCP Server
  • Port Forwarding
  • DNS SERVER
  • DNS RELAY
  • UPNP
  • Bandwidth Graphing
  • Network Monitoring/IPS/IDS

As for reliability I have not had any software crashes at all with the software. It runs as designed and it is stable.  Combine that with  decent hardware and you have a DIY Router/FIREWALL that can compete with enterprise class devices. I highly recommend this software if you would like to make your router/firewall device with used computer parts you may have lying around. It’s good to re-purpose old hardware and best of all your recycling.

I hope this has inspired you to try it out. If you use  or have tried this software let me know what you think in the comments.

RTA