Installation on an old Toshiba Portégé
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Hello! I have an old laptop that I'd like to use as a router for my home network. It has the benefit of being small and low power and quiet. However, there are several problems:
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It has no CD Drive. I've managed to get various versions of linux installed via PXE boot, but I do not know if the process is different to pfSense/FreeBSD (I've searched the forum and relevant threads appear to be dead or link to missing sites).
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It only has one Ethernet port. I'm prepared to buy a PCMCIA ethernet card, however I've read that there can be compatibility issues. Can anyone recommend a PCMCIA ethernet card that is compatible with FreeBSD/pfSense?
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Is it worth my time? It has 512MB RAM, an Intel Pentium M 1Ghz CPU. It'll be serving four or so users + some on wifi and I want to do things like QoS and traffic reporting/controlling like this: http://i.imgur.com/cXi0t.png (not sure what module that is though).
I'll probably be using a gigabit switch for the internal network, and perhaps the old router running WiFi connected to that switch for my wireless.
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- It has no CD Drive.
If your laptop will boot from a USB drive and you can access a USB CD drive you could probably install from the USB CD drive. Alternatively, put your laptop hard drive in another system which can boot from a CD drive and install there, then move the hard drive back to the laptop. There will probably be a couple of minor tweaks required after moving the drive.
- It only has one Ethernet port.
If your gigabit switch supports VLANs and the laptop ethernet supports VLANs you could use the switch as a port multiplier to provide multiple "virtual" interfaces to pfSense.
- Is it worth my time? It has 512MB RAM, an Intel Pentium M 1Ghz CPU. It'll be serving four or so users + some on wifi and I want to do things like QoS and traffic reporting/controlling like this: http://i.imgur.com/cXi0t.png (not sure what module that is though).
The CPU and memory are probably more than adequate.