Pfsense router/firewall with dual WAN anyone?

PC, Gaming & Console Lobby
#1

Hi Folks,

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.

So I got one of these:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004383700247.html?spm=a2g0o.order_list.0.0.57ff1802EanGMT

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:

https://www.dlink.com/en/products/dms-106xt-6-port-multi-gigabit-unmanaged-switch

Got a 10Gb/s card for my Synology NAS connecting it to the 10Gb/s LAN port in the D-link

got a couple of 2.5Gb/s to USB dongles for PCs that don’t have a 2.5Gb/s ethernet port

and it all works pretty well!

#2

Hello, thank you so much for this post.
I was looking around for a setup that i can use.

btw, may i know how much ram and storage did you add to your setup?

#3

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