First time pfsense installer - looking for feedback
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Hello all,
After searching around the forums and wiki for a few days I decided it best to ask my question to the community as a whole.
Here is my situation. My current network setup is two v1 WRT54GS with tomato firmware v1.21 with plans to to update to v1.22 in the near future. One box is connected to my cable modem and serves my desktop computers via LAN and uses an encrypted wireless distribution system (WDS) to connect to the second WRT54GS in the living room that serves a variety of network enable devices. I had to do this because hardwiring things is not an option currently. I would like to keep this system in place only for the wireless link, all other function can be sent elsewhere
Wanting to have a bit more control over my network I purchased a Soekris net5501-70 (link). I also purchased the Soekirs vpn1411 (link) card to handle any the VPN needs and intel PCI gigabit (link) card for a possible future gigabit network connection. The CF card is 2GB and rhere is also an 80GB SATA hard drive installed in the net5501 box for any added storage needs.
Most of my reasoning to use pfsense is in order to set up a VPN for me when I am not at home. m0n0wall didn't seem to have the support I wanted and trying to create all this on my own from FreeBSD or OpenBSD, while fun, would take too much time. I settled on pfsense. Before I being installing I need a question clarified.
I UNDERSTAND THE EMBEDDED INSTALL DOES NOT SUPPORT PACKAGES!
I would like to use the CF disk for any system files that need to be there. I know this is suppose to be a read only disk.
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Is it possible to use an embedded install to get all system files that need to be on the CF disk and use the 80GB hard drive to install anything that might need to do lots of writes?(packages, apps, etc.)
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If not what will be the down side of using the full system install only on the 80GB hard drive?
Ideally I would like to be able to use the following things on the net5501:
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Firewall
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Traffic Shaping
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NAT
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VPN
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DHCP
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Wake on LAN
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Possible Darknet Server
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RADIUS Server
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Light FTP server
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VPN (utilizing the vpn1411)
I would love to hear any feedback from community members about if what I am trying to do is possible or I am just fooling myself of what this box can do.
Thanks in advance!
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Im pretty sure there is no way to boot from flash and use IDE to install packages.
This guide might help you to install the full version on your IDE hard drive.
I don't see why it won't work on a hard drive.
http://devwiki.pfsense.org/FullInstallOnWRAP?show_comments=1