Using pfSense voor +1000 users

[Render]

Hello,

Next week we would like to offer free WiFi for +/- 1.500 users. A simple router wouldn't do the job so I installed pfSense on a workstation (Pentium 4 3.20ghz, 2GB DDRII, 2x Intel Gigabit).

Maybe someone here can give me advice about this setup? Everything works fine but I can't simulate 1.500 users of course.. I would like to limit the bandwith PER DEVICE, is this possible? I see only traffic shaping per interface?

Thank you.

[heper]

just firewalling/nat would not be an issue with those hardware specs …
not sure if the trafficshaping will have much effect on cpu usage ( it might )

for more info on shaping see the 'traffic shaping' forum section

[dhatz]

I've done a fair amount of thinking and testing various configurations for exactly this type of usage scenario.

If you want to serve ~1500 concurrent Wifi users, and assuming you've solved the Wifi engineering issues, then pfsense can provide several parts of the overall solution, acting as a DHCP server, router, firewall, traffic shaping and NAT device.

You should also do some thinking ahead about how to best mitigate certain possible problems, because just a few virus-infected PCs among the ~1500 ones, can bring a network to its knees.