Complete newb looking to start using pfSense
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Hi everyone, I've been wanting to run pfSense for a while now but never really got into it.. well now my 5 year old router is slowly dieing and I think I'd like to dive right into pfSense instead of buying another 'regular' router :) I've heard about pfSense a lot, from death_hawk and Alter3d Reality on ncix forums (maybe you guys have heard of these 2 folks?), though my software skills are lacking unless I've got a nice GUI to work with so please keep that in mind if I start asking stupid questions ::)
First question (many more to come as I progress), I have 2 options for running pfSense: 1.in virtual machine on my htpc 2.on a P3 800mhz with 512mb ram
I'm leaning towards option 2, and I'm leaning towards using a usb drive/CF to save 5 watts or so unless performance is significantly better with a hdd. I'd like to first find this embedded image that I've been reading about, but all I see on the download mirrors page are nanobsd's 1g, 2g, 4g, 512mb (what do those sizes mean?) and a liveCD installer. Does nanobsd=embedded? Feel free to link me to guides or other forum posts, I usually search for myself but there seems to be so much information and so many (outdated) guides that I don't know where to start ???Thanks
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I would use option 2, much easier for you in so many ways.
I ran pfsense on a CF card for a while and it worked great. There are some reasons why you wouldn't want to use a CF card is if you need applications that write to the drive several times like a proxy server. HDD performance will be higher than a CF, but it really depends on your needs.1g, 2g, etc refer to the size of your CF card. You wouldn't put 2g on a 1GB CF card.
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Thanks for the response, once I've got the iso file extracted how can I mount it to my usb? I found this thread to write it to a usb http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=14763.0 though it looks like it only applies to fit-PC. I don't even know if this old P3 supports booting off a usb, if not I guess I'll use a CF to ide adapter or something.
EDIT: nevermind I got it, looks like it's pretty well documented. Gonna give physdiskwrite a shot right now ;D
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Hey good luck!
I'm also just another geeky home user like you who has gotten really interested in pfSense. I've actually gotten it running in a VM on my mac to test with before I transfer it to my file server. pfSense sure has tons of options!
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Apparently my P3 mobo (CUV4X) doesn't support booting from usb, I'm too cheap to buy a CF card and adapter, and my intel Atom doesn't support virtualization. I gave a shot at the VM on my htpc, I just installed vmware (didn't install any add-ons that they recommended) and booted up with everything on default, I didn't unplug my old router which may have been the problem… I got to the screen where it had a bunch of options corresponding to numbers. I tried to access the webpage with the IP it gave me, but the browser couldn't find it. What exactly do I have to do to 'start' it? I have 2 nic's installed in there, do I need to plug the modem into one of them and the other into the switch (gs108t) before it'll work? Can I somehow plug my modem directly into the switch and get it to work? Thanks.
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You also need to make sure your Virtual network is created properly. If you have set to NAT on the VM settings then you won't be able to access the page. The VM needs to get it's own IPs from your DHCP server, so adjust the VMware settings accordingly.
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Could you please elaborate on the part about setting up VLAN's? I don't understand anything about vlan except what it essentially is, I don't know what it is used for etc… I just skipped that part. I've reinstalled the VM so now I'm starting from the original 1.2.3 VM, what exactly do I have to do? If you could list out some idiot proof steps for setting up the vlan and getting pfsense running I'd really appreciate it. Thanks.
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Your running pfsense in VMware correct? It's just a virtual network and not a VLAN. You need to change the network type to bridged so that it gets its own IP.