Ideas about building my home network
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So, right now I am looking into hosting a website from home, it won't get much traffic and is for personal use so I don't think I need an outside source to host it. I was thinking it might be fun to turn my old desktop into a webserver/firefall/router ect…
I honestly don't know a ton about networking, but this was my plan.
Install a Linux Distro on the desktop, and virtualize PFSense as my router, and then have tomcat running on that machine as well, is this something that is alright to do? Or should my router be it's own physical box? Are there any issues that I will have with trying to run PFsense in a VM on top of linux? I am open to ideas, but I think this is a solution that should work well.
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Standard security practice is to host a FW on its own HW. That being said, this is of course possible. I don't think that security is going to be a huge problem for you. There are caveats that running FW in virtual environment, but there are lots on this forum about how to set those up and get around problems. Just have to look around.
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Huge fan of running pfsense virtual - but why not just put say esxi on the hardware and then run pfsense as a vm, and then whatever other os you want to host your website, etc.
As to running services out of the house - other than playing/learning there is little reason to host your own site. You would be be much better off just hosting the site offsite. The electric alone is going to cost you more than hosting it somewhere most likely. You can get low end vps for like $15 a year that can host up websites for example. I have 2 of these low cost vpses – they make great endpoints for vpn, they are perfect for testing from other locations and other networks for network issues, etc. I have a honeypot running on one for example that I host up a website I can access to get info about the honeypot, etc. etc.
But if for learning experience I really love doing pfsense off a vm!!
