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A project log for pfSense Router/Firewall Install

*on a Dell Dimension E521, lol!

sarandisarandi 03/03/2021 at 05:140 Comments

My goodness, it has been a year, and not in the melodramatic sense. I mean a literal year has passed since I last posted, though if any year were worthy of melodrama it would indeed be last year.

Nonsense aside, this build has been my home network's primary router for the past week. So far so good, though there have been a few hiccups.

I just ordered double the RAM and am hoping that will be sufficient to smooth out what seemed to be memory bottlenecks, though I should really go through the logs to see if I can glean more insight.

I decided to skip the BSD jails unless I can get at least 8GB of RAM working (16 seems like a possible max as it's a DDR2 machine on the cusp of DDR3, so 4GB memory units are both expensive and of dubious quality, thus 2GB units are far more practical). Instead I'll keep running the controller software on the old laptop and look into switching it to my Debian server.

Pfsense is recognizing the network card ports accurately as 1000baseT Full Duplex, but I should really test local speeds to verify functionality. To do that, I'll likely use iPerf.

More coming soon hopefully.

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