Install with 1 ethernet and 1 wirless card

[sillydrunk247]

Ok, I'm posting this because I have a specific set up I need. I am an information system security student and I need a home lab to work with, but a students budget :(… Here is generally what I have ...

2 old desktops each with 2 NIC's and 1 wireless
2 old laptops each with 1 NIC and 1 wireless.

I need to set up one desktop as a windows server at the gateway of my network and one of the laptops as a pfsense box (this requirement is due to hardware limitations). I have been searching for weeks for answers to setting up that pfsense box with out a second NIC. I found a few guides that said to set the wireless as the WAN and nic as the LAN, configure a VPN an then connect. Well .. I'm still learning and the vpn set up was kicking my butt.

While searching, I found several others that were trying to do the same thing and this is how I solved the problem (without the hassle of VPN's).

I set up a vlan on the NIC which gave me 3 adapters to choose from:
  ath0 --> wireless
  rl0  ---> wired
  vlan0 -> vlan

I assigned the adapters as:

rl0 = lan
  vlan0= WAN
  ath0 = Opt1

Now connect to the wired NIC like you normally would and configure your wireless. Be sure to configure the DHCP server for your opt1 interface and set your firewall rules to allow opt1 to connect to the internet.

Last step, I reassigned rl0 to be the WAN interface and vlan0 to be the LAN interface, connected the box to the windows server and rebooted. :)

I hope this is helpful to some of you out there ;)