Installing on a public network

[cdbrown2018]

Hi everyone,

I am moving into an apartment that provides free WiFi, which is awesome, but not protected. I was hoping to use a pfSense box to VPN to a Linode server, and to use a router to distribute my own, private network.

I am somewhat familiar with networking, but I wouldn't say I am confident. Are there any considerations I need to take when installing pfSense so that I don't accidentally take down the main network used by other residents?

I read somewhere I need to configure this on a different subnet, but that may have been referring to the installation of a DD-WRT router as a repeater. If I'm wrong about that though, I don't want to cause IP conflicts or the like.

Thanks for any info.

[viragomann]

@cdbrown2018 said in Installing on a public network:

I am somewhat familiar with networking, but I wouldn't say I am confident. Are there any considerations I need to take when installing pfSense so that I don't accidentally take down the main network used by other residents?

No, pfSense will be a client in that wireless network as well as the others are. Connect an access point to its WAN and set up your private network on the LAN, maybe by using an additional AP.

[cdbrown2018]

@viragomann Is it possible to setup pfSense using a wireless connection to the WAN, as I won't have physical access to the complex's router or any ethernet ports? I've seen conflicting answers.

[viragomann]

@cdbrown2018
You will have to find a way to connect pfSense to the wireless network. pfSense itself doesn't support wireless hardware like wifi ac sticks well. But depending on your hardware, you may run for instance a Linux on bare metal and virtualize pfSenes on it. So you can abstract the hardware layer for pfSense.