I really like SonicOS – I know that this is a polarising statement – but it worked just fine for me. I liked the SonicWall appliances from the old, used, SoHo 3 I picked up from a local newsgroup<\/em> to the TZ170 Enhanced to the current TZ205W. I started looking at a new SonicWall but that was pushing the budget limit with the annual maintenance. Plus, adding IDPS, etc. could really slow the system down. I also did not need a wireless version as I had Asus and Netgear access points. Now, I do not need<\/em> 500+ Mbit\/s but is do want<\/em> it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of my staff – who is very open source – mentioned pfSense<\/a>. It seemed interesting but I would have to procure my own hardware. I like having separate network infrastructure even though I’m a big VMware ESXi fan. I then spent a few months thinking about it…<\/p>\n\n\n\n I then happened on a video on YouTube<\/a> by Tom Lawrence of Lawrence Technology Services<\/a>. I like Tom’s videos; they can be a little technical which is great and his howto guides are great. Anyway, after watching a couple of his videos on pfSense I started looking at the Netgate SG-3100<\/a>. Hmm… It is an appliance – like my old SonicWalls – so I would not have to buy additional hardware and ran pfSense. Looking good. I then went to buy it and… It was out of stock on Amazon (Canada). Dunh!<\/p>\n\n\n\n More thought…<\/p>\n\n\n\n I started researching what others were using for hosting pfSense and noted a few products. I eventually landed on a rack mountable chassis with 6 \u00a0Intel 82583V GigE interfaces, an Intel I5-2540M with AES-NI support (was<\/em> going to be required<\/u> for pfSense 2.5 but no longer; that being said, it does help with OpenVPN offloading), 2 GB RAM and a 32 GB SSD on Amazon (Canada) for about $400 (similar to this one<\/a>). Now, it did come with pfSense, from China<\/em>, so that had to go. (Do not<\/strong> use it, do not<\/strong> upgrade it; reinstall<\/strong> from an official download. See this<\/a> video.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Off with a fresh, clean, checksummed ISO from pfsense.org I installed pfSense 2.4.4. I configured everything basically the same way that I had the old TZ300W (stay tuned for part 2 on what come out of that) and this was the result of my first speed test:<\/p>\n\n\n\n As I keep saying, I am not a blogger and I do not post very often or with any regularity. Sometimes I use this blog for posting items that I would like to remember later and had a hard time … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog.pelleys.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/pfsense-logo-small.png\"){kind=logo}
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