4 ms·

I am a big fan of PFSense. Not a huge fan of Netgate as a company and the direction they are taking the product. In any case, you can load it onto some fairly

I am a big fan of PFSense. Not a huge fan of Netgate as a company and the direction they are taking the product. In any case, you can load it onto some fairly low cost hardware for your typical home user. It's fantastic. I am not a huge fan of the Ubiquiti routers. They required loading a config onto them just to get DHCP enabled and NAT setup for a typical 1 WAN and 1 LAN environment. Why on earth they would ship without that config on them when 99.9999% of environments are like that is bewildering to me. Don't know if it's changed since then but I haven't gone back to mess with them since.

squarefoot 8y ago
I couldn't recommend PFSense more. Setting up my home firewall years ago using it on a pcengines.ch board was really easy and fun. I used a (now long discontinued) WRAP board back in the day, then when broadband became faster I had to remove it because the slow processor would bottleneck my connection, but I'm looking forward to get faster hardware to have it working again. One day, well over 10 years ago, while I was moving from the old ISP to a new one, they screwed up something and I spent some weeks cut off from the Internet. The WRAP board had a mini-pci connector I already had fitted with a powerful WiFi card, so I connected a high gain directional antenna in place of the low gain one and started monitoring the channels. Back in the day there still were weak WEP encrypted connections, but I was even more lucky because a local ISP which delivered their routers with no default encryption had no less than 3 customers in my neighborhood, one of which, probably an office with no traffic at least since the evening, allowed me to surf a lot faster than my previous connection. PFSense was a godsend because all I had to do was set the rules so that the WLAN interface became a slave seen as the WAN, so I got back online all my cabled home network in a matter of minutes. As a Linux guy I have to admit PFSense and similar products (NAS4Free etc) interface is the best I have ever seen around wrt functionality and ease of use, sadly OpenWRT web interface simply doesn't stand a chance, and I'm not referring to aesthetics as I'm aware OpenWRT is aimed at hardware with orders of magnitude less resources, but pure functionality - in fact I have never been able to configure a small tp-link mr3020 router to use it as a WiFi bridge for my networked but not wireless printer. Yes it can be done and there is a HOWTO on that task, but it doesn't work and low level iptables scripts aren't exactly my strong point. It would be trivial doing that with PFSense, but sadly it cannot fit into that device. /Rant
krupan 8y ago
They come with a wizard for setting up basics like that now.

squarefoot 8y ago

I couldn't recommend PFSense more. Setting up my home firewall years ago using it on a pcengines.ch board was really easy and fun. I used a (now long discontinued) WRAP board back in the day, then when broadband became faster I had to remove it because the slow processor would bottleneck my connection, but I'm looking forward to get faster hardware to have it working again. One day, well over 10 years ago, while I was moving from the old ISP to a new one, they screwed up something and I spent some weeks cut off from the Internet. The WRAP board had a mini-pci connector I already had fitted with a powerful WiFi card, so I connected a high gain directional antenna in place of the low gain one and started monitoring the channels. Back in the day there still were weak WEP encrypted connections, but I was even more lucky because a local ISP which delivered their routers with no default encryption had no less than 3 customers in my neighborhood, one of which, probably an office with no traffic at least since the evening, allowed me to surf a lot faster than my previous connection. PFSense was a godsend because all I had to do was set the rules so that the WLAN interface became a slave seen as the WAN, so I got back online all my cabled home network in a matter of minutes. As a Linux guy I have to admit PFSense and similar products (NAS4Free etc) interface is the best I have ever seen around wrt functionality and ease of use, sadly OpenWRT web interface simply doesn't stand a chance, and I'm not referring to aesthetics as I'm aware OpenWRT is aimed at hardware with orders of magnitude less resources, but pure functionality - in fact I have never been able to configure a small tp-link mr3020 router to use it as a WiFi bridge for my networked but not wireless printer. Yes it can be done and there is a HOWTO on that task, but it doesn't work and low level iptables scripts aren't exactly my strong point. It would be trivial doing that with PFSense, but sadly it cannot fit into that device. /Rant

krupan 8y ago

They come with a wizard for setting up basics like that now.