Turn your old PC into a kickass router with pfSense

Old router getting you down? Lack of features, instability, horrible admin panel? It’s time to turn your old pc into a router.

Before i built my pfsense router, i used a netgear DG834GT. It crashed alot, expecially during times of heavy load like when my brother and his girlfriend visited. Often it wouldn’t even automatically reboot/reconnect like it should do. It would usually ignore changes in settings such as port forwarding, and I often found myself manually resetting it 2 or even 3 times a day.

After i built my new router, It never crashes, ever. It’s been up for 86 days and counting, and that’s how long my ISP reports i’ve been connected for too. I actually have the top uptime for my ISP, I think that’s pretty cool. Plus we don’t ever have to have bandwith hog arguments anymore due to the built in traffic shaper. Torrenting while gaming just isn’t a problem anymore. I’ve had atleast 10 users online and it’s completely rock solid. I hear people on the pfsense channel with thousands of people online and no problems.

Heres some screenshots.

BandwithD

pfSense phpsysinfo

pfSense dashboard

Check this page out for a full list of features. Of course, this is a fully-featured FreeBSD system. So if your into messing with stuff this has pretty much any features you want it to have. The possibilities are endless!

Intrested? You’ll need a PC 2 network cards. You will also need a modem. If you want more than one ethernet port you’ll need a switch, and if you want wireless access you’ll need a wireless access point. You can use your old wireless router as a wireless access point. It shouldn’t cause much of a problem as most of the issues are caused by overloading and or overheating. The PC will be taking most of the workload and the router is pretty much just an antenna on the end of an ethernet cable.

As for the specs of said PC. It depends on the throughput. If you don’t know this. Head over to SpeedTest.net and run a test.
CPU Speed:
<10 Mbps - 100Mhz
10-20 Mbps - 500Mhz
21-50 Mbps - 1Ghz

As for memory the pfSense website says you need 128MB. You might be able to get away with 64MB if your ok with it being a little slow, but 128MB is best. If you want extra plugins i'd recommend 256.

You'll also need a CD drive to install from (this can be removed after installing) and a 1GB hard drive.

For more information on requirements see this page

Don’t forget to backup any important data from the pc your going to use, as it’s going to be completely formatted!

Got everything you need? download pfSense and burn it to CD.

Switch on the PC, put the disc in. Make sure your PC is set to boot from CD in it’s setup/bios.
A menu will appear showing the FreeBSD Logo and giving you some options. Press 1 to Boot FreeBSD, or just wait for the timer to pass.
The installer will now ask you a few questions…
“Do you want to set up VLANs now”. Unless you know what a VLAN is, answer no.
“Enter the LAN interface name or ‘a’ for auto-detection”. Press a, You will now be asked to “Connect the LAN interface now and make sure the link is up.” Plug your switch into the PC, make sure the lights come on if it has any, then press enter.
“Enter the WAN interface name or ‘a’ for auto-detection”. Press a, Plug your modem into the second network card on your PC, press enter.
“Enter the Optional 1 interface name or ‘a’ for auto-detection (or nothing if finished)” we are finished, so just press enter.
pfSense will now show you the assigned interfaces, and ask you if you want to proceed, answer yes.

pfSense is now running, but it’s only running from CD right now. So if you switch your PC off you’ll be back to square one. You need to select option 99) Install pfSense to a hard drive/memory drive, etc. Prepare for more questions!

“Your selected environment uses the following console settings”… Unless you want to change anything, press the down arrow to select < Accept these Settings > then hit return.
“Choose one of the following tasks to perform” This is a no-brainer. You want to install pfSense!
“Select a disk on which to install pfSense” Hopefully there is only one option here. If there isn’t i recommend removing any extra hard-drives to save power.
“Would you like to format this disk?” Yup, you would. So select Format this Disk.
“Select geometry” pfSense should fill it in for you, so just select Use this Geometry.
“ABOUT TO FORMAT! Proceed?” Yup, Format.
“Partition Disk?” You also want a partition, so select Partition Disk.
“Edit Partitions” pfSense automatically fills this in for you. So just select Accept and Create.
“Select a partition” You should only have one option here.
“Are you SURE?” You better be! select ok.
“Select Subpartitions” pfSense has this sorted too, so just Accept and Create.

Now it will install. This will probably take a while, expecially on your old pc. Go grab a pizza or something.
All done? Lets get back to work.

“Install Kernel(s)” Unless you know otherwise, you probably want Uniprocessor kernel (one processor).
“Install Bootblocks(s)” pfSense fills this in for you, Accept and Install Bootblocks.
“Reboot” Yay - all done. Select reboot and remove the CD as you are told.

Up it comes again, just like you was on the CD.
Now you’ll need to plug your personal computer into the switch, and head over to http://192.168.1.1 It’ll ask you for a username and password.
Username: admin
Password: pfsense
Logged in? excellent. If you where unable to connect, make sure your switch is plugged into the lan interface, If your using an old router as your switch, make sure DHCP/NAT is disabled, then try again.

Now we have more questions to answer, fun fun.
You can leave hostname and domain as they are, unless you want to change them.
DNS servers you can use the ones provided by your ISP, but personally i prefer to use OpenDNS currently OpenDNS’s IPs are 208.67.222.222 208.67.220.220. So set them as your primary and secondary DNS server.

Next page, you need to set your time zone correctly, leave the time server as it is (unless you want to use your own time server), next.

Now heres a fun page. This is where you’ll setup all your Internet connection information. If you have a PPPoA connection, select PPPoE, It worked for me (My connection is PPPoA). You’ll want to leave MAC Address and MTU blank, fill in the appropriate form for your internet connection. Leave everything else as it is, click next.

Set your password, this is pretty simple. Leaving things with the default password is bad

Click reload.

Here we are, your routers admin panel. Pretty cool huh? You should be online now, and everythings done!

I find that certain applications that use UDP extensively (such as skype) have problems getting through the firewall unless you go to Firewall -> NAT -> Outbound and change it to “Manual Outbound NAT rule generation (Advanced Outbound NAT (AON))” So you may want to do that.

Another cool thing to check out is System -> Packages. These are all plugins you can install for your router. As you can see theres plenty of stuff here. Personally i have Dashboard, BandwithD and phpSysInfo installed.

You’ll also probably want to setup the traffic shaper (Firewall -> Traffic shaper) to stop any bandwith hogging related arguements your household may suffer from

If you want to use your router as a wireless access point, you’ll need to plug it in (don’t plug it into pfSense yet!) login using your PC, disable DHCP and NAT, set it’s IP address to 192.168.1.2 then plug it into your switch which is connected to pfSense.

Hope you’ve got everything up and running. If your having trouble don’t hesitate to contact me using the chat link at the top of this page! Have fun, and enjoy your new kickass router.

Power saving tips:
Remove any unused devices, such as CD, Floppy, Unused PCI cards, Etc.
Underclock the processor
Replace fans with large heatsinks
People with money can buy an Alix system board These things are crazy, they use like 12 watts of power compared to the average PC using about 200!