Anyone else like me has a subscription to a local ISP but also to Starhub Fibre TV?
I’ve been a longtime subscriber to Viewqwest’s 1Gb/s fibre broadband and a couple of years ago was forced to switch from Starhub’s cable subscription to fiber TV, which actually comes with a “free” 1Gb/s internet connection. So I was wondering how to take advantage of the additional data connection from Starhub and get maybe 2Gb/s aggregate bandwidth in to the home.
That’s when I discovered pfsense, a pretty powerful free router/firewall software that can run on these mini fanless PCs.
installed Pfsense, set up 2 WAN ports (which connect to the Viewqwest and Starhub fibre modems) in load balancing mode and with a 2.5Gb/s LAN connection into one off these:
Hi, my set up has 8GB of DDR4 and 512GB of SSD storage. If you’re using it as just a router and not planning on any virtualization this amount of memory is more than sufficient. Based on the reports from pfsense, it barely uses more than 50% of RAM. Storage even more so, pfsense install using very little space and if I could find a 256GB SSD I would have use that
Was looking around for a better firewall as I had been opening a port on my router to point to Qnap NAS’s QuFirewall and QVPN. Was advised by a security expert to use a dedicated VPN server and security gateway in front of my main router rather than the NAS firewall/VPN even though Qnap’s is quite good. I looked at this PFSense route and its fairly expensive. Digging around, I found this OpenWRT solution for about USD50. With 2 ports, it doesn’t do load balancing of two WANs, unless you add a USB-c Ethernet adapter, but otherwise does almost anything that Pfsense does with a nice web interface. If you want to do more complicated things you can go into OpenWRT and its fast, the Wireguard VPN reaches about 300+mbps in my testing. It’s also low power and runs off a USB port. Superb little device.