Skills needed to install pfSense

loupo77

Hi everyone,

I work for a school. We have some a network with windows computers connected to the internet. This has been installed by an external company but there were no restriction at all to limit access to adult content websites and so one. This is quite risky in a school with teenagers don't you think ? ;)

Well I'm not an informatician but I have good computers skills and I configured all network cards to point to OpenDNS in order to disallow access to adult content websites. This is working correctly but this solution has many disadvantages :

difficult to maintain
dependency to the OpenDNS
and most of all
it doesn't block everything: some adult content or images can be accessed with a simple research by google
So I heard that it would be better to implement a firewall. And this can be done with PfSense.
My questions are rather simple and your answers will help me to take my decision :

Is it possible for someone not having network administrator skills to implement this solution?
What are the minimum requirements for the machine hosting PfSense ? Would a "simple" computer with 4 GB ram, 3 Ghz, Intel Core i5 be enough ? I have to tell you that we have +- 40 computers and to switches behind the internet access point.
PfSense is installed with the OS FreeBSD I think. Will this work in a windows environnement ?

Thanks in advance for your precious help !

loupo

KOM

1. There are many guides online about how to do this, and the users here can help you with specific questions if oyu get stuck on something.

2. Yes, that should be fine.

3. Your LAN clients don't really care what OS is being used by your router/firewall.

Reeko

I dont think you need a high expertice on this. For several reasons:
1-. The interface is very intuite (in my opinion)
2-. There are a lot of guides on youtube if you are not a reader one
3-. Setting up filtering of content rules is very easyly to do. Mostly if you install squid + squidguard + a decent blacklist (i use http://www.shallalist.de/Downloads/shallalist.tar.gz, it's very good and it have a lot of categorys).

If you need some help, i could guide you in your goal.

loupo77

Thanks a lot for your replies! I'm more confident now to try to install pfsense.
Have a good day!