More on pfSense

New here, I’ve been setting up and trying to learn and understand pfSense, so far so good. I’ve been following the videos posted on “Lawrence Technology” Youtube page which have helped me tremendously. Possibly I missed something, but is there a place on here that has a category for pfSense, or is there “walk throughs” that I can find that explain the different processes. I’m looking for something beginner to intermediate. So far, I’ve built a box ( I had from a few years ago) have three network ports, separated my my IOT stuff from the LAN, setup a MESH wireless in bridge mode, got OpenVPN working, installed and setup PF Blocker NG. Now I would like to fine tune things, understand more of what’s going on under the hood. Any direction would be helpful, thanks in advance!

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I cover it from start to finish in this video https://youtu.be/fsdm5uc_LsU and there are a series of other video diving into specific topics such as using Suricata https://youtu.be/S0-vsjhPDN0 or how to do packet capture with pfsense and wireshark. https://youtu.be/a9t_7JKpsmg

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You’ve probably seen the pfsense book https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/book/ it’s pretty comprehensive.

I set-up pfsense 18m ago and have been tweaking it for the past year, there’s always something that comes up that some how was overlooked.

I’d recommend buying a decent managed switch that will allow you to setup vlans, then you have a wider range of things to play with :slight_smile: put those three ports in a LAGG then you suddenly have some redundancy. If your AP supports multiple SSIDs then it’s very easy to setup a guest vlan that is isolated from the rest of your network.

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Thanks Tom, I’ve watched a number of your videos which gave me a great foot-hold in starting. I’m now going back through to fine tune and have a better understanding of what I did or didn’t do correctly. Again, thanks for all your effort that you put into your videos.

Yes, I have a few copies of the pfsense book loaded on a few different devices. I also have an old copy I purchased a few years back, but it’s now way out of date. Any recommendations in regards to a decent managed switch?

Well I use Netgear mainly because they are cheap and have good warranties.

Can be a bit of a mess sorting through them on Amazon. All I’ll say is to read the manual before purchase but the things to look for include

  • LACP aggregation
  • SNMP
    They tend to be on the better specd models, however, the downsides are
  • the GUI is dated
  • the fans on some models operate at full blast
  • some models have a stupidly complex way to setup https connections

As ever caveat emptor

Link below to a previous entry I added FYI