Sorry if I am posting this in the wrong Category, not a good start with my first post.
I am a simple home user of PfSense, I have my PfSense machine, a couple of unmanaged switches, one wireless router setup as an access point and only 10 devices connected to my network.
I have one computer with Private Internet Access VPN (aka PIA) installed. I know I could setup PIA in PfSense. However, I do not always have the VPN on and at times I also change the geo-location, so I find it easiest to control the VPN on that computer.
My question really is should I do any settings in PfSense to optimize the VPN connection?
There isn’t really anything to do in pfSense to “optimize” the VPN connection. Only thing I could think of is prioritizing that traffic using QoS or traffic shaping. But if everything works I wouldn’t touch it.
Thanks for the response Paul. At times I seem to be getting lag on my other devices when the VPN is active and when I check PfSense the RTT/RTTsd has gone way up. The PfSense Processor Usage is hovering at about 10-14% when this happens and Memory Usage is about the same percents, so I do not think it is hardware related. I wonder if the cable company might be throttling me since I never come close to using all my bandwidth at any time.
If your RTT/RTTsd is going way up you are most likely using up your bandwitdh. Are you downloading or uploading large files? A vpn by itself should have no impact.
You might have a risk of leaking your DNS, so I’d check that and you’d might want to employ some kind of kill switch, such that if the VPN were to fail the traffic doesn’t exit the ISP.
When you buy a managed switch you’ll be in a better position to use vlans and allocate one for exiting via the VPN.