Building my own Router with NAS capabilities

robifis

1st off - apologies if this is in the wrong thread - Admin, please move it to the appropriate location.

Dear all,

This might be a bit of a longer question but as the title suggest I am looking to build my own router running pfsense with Nas capabilities.

I currently have a very poor solution in my house where I have a separate normal D-Link Router and a Separate Synology Nas.
My aim is to build a rack-mounted router (For Firewall, VPN and the likes) for my new house and combine it with storage to keep random movies/tv shows and just general files that I don't care much about but want to have access to as I travel a lot (particularly movies and tv shows).

The aim is then to add a network switch and hardwire the whole house as well as having another set of more important backup drives stored somewhere else as as well as separate system for my surveillance system (burglar alarm!)

The inspiration came from having watched TekSyndicate online as well as Linus Tech Tips who build a Nas and router respectively out of older parts.

Is this doable with just pfsense (just the router/nas combo)??

Many thanks,
Robert

johnpoz

Really, so you get one troll asking about nas/pfsense - next thing we know we have another 1 post wonder asking the same freaking thing when we told the first one there is no interest in this.

Your building a RACK why would you combine your router and nas together? If you want them on the same hardware then build a VM host box and run router as VM, nas as VM along with any other stuff you need on their own VMs, etc..

What sort of budget are we talking.. Or what old parts do you have laying around?

robifis

Apologies, didn't mean to stir up anything, I have not seen the other thread/only partially looked - I will have a look now.

Budget is about $1000 ish (~£750).

I have no idea about VM at all hence why I was wondering if there is a "simple" method with just one piece of software (pf sense) and
a router/nas config with a couple of extra HDDs.

As mentioned in my first post, I am completely new to all this and are running consumer hardware at home.

Many thanks once again,
Robert

KOM

Here is the thread John was talking about:

https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=102782.0

I have no idea about VM at all…

Time to join the rest of us here in the 21st century :D

johnpoz

~$1k is a pretty nice budget.. You could buy a actual pfsense box from pfsense and prebuilt nas with that.. Why does it need to be 1 piece of hardware? As you stated your going to have a RACK.. What is the point of a rack if your only going to have 1 thing on it?

How much storage do you need/want?

But sure that would buy a pretty decent VM host, and then use whatever hypervisor you want, esxi, hyper-v, xen.. If you are really thinking of getting away from off the shelf user grade stuff then really should do some research on visualization..