FRONTPAGE Building a pfSense Firewall

what is the hardware?

Just as a heads up for everyone
this Guide even being 3 years old works perfectly
just installed on a semi old HP Compaq
it has a Pentium 4 HT
4gb Ram
30gb IDE HDD
1 gigabitEthernet port (onboard)
1 fastEthernet random HP Nic
Runs Great!

also why is this not pinned? the is a great guide!

Hardware sequence when inserting pfSense firewall into a network

I am sorry for asking such simplistic questions, but have never setup a firewall other than what Windows provides. My project is to setup a firewall and content filtering for a small (less than 100 kids) private school. My background is not networking and school has no budget to hire a professional network consultant so I am having to learn everything I can ASAP.

The school has a 50MB static Internet connection that is connected to a cable modem provided to them by their Internet provider - Charter. CAT5 cable then goes from the cable modem to a Linksys wireless router that has the wireless turned off but is used to provide IP addresses from what I can tell. Then a CAT5 cable goes from the Linksys wireless router to a fully functional Netgear wireless router to supply internet to the wireless laptops and smartphones. One more CAT5 cable from the Linksys wireless router goes to a 24 port switch to supply Internet access to all of the desktop computers.

That is the hardware setup that they are using and works fine other than the fact that a couple kids have found their way around the plug in browser filter and are going where they shouldn't.

I have a Lenovo 3ghz dual core desktop computer with 2gb RAM and 80gb drive that I would like to install pfSense onto and use it along with Squidguard - just like you have done in this great article!

My assumption is that the sequence of hardware should be as such:

Cable modem -> WAN side of pfSense/Squidguard Lenovo desktop -> LAN side of Lenovo desktop -> 24port switch -> Netgear wireless router. I have removed the Linksys wireless router since I think pfSense should take its place and use DHCP to assign dynamic IP addresses for the network?

Having said that, I will have to check the pfSense documentation and see if i can figure out exactly how to do that!

Please let me know if I am on the right track and if not - PLEASE let me know what I should change?!

Also, I noticed that there are several places that pfSense asks to choose between static and DHCP. Since I have a static line coming in and want pfSense to assign IP addresses, what would the appropriate settings be that I would need to change?

I thank you in advance for any and all help that comes my way!!!

Goulmassian said:

I thank you in advance for any and all help that comes my way!!!

Click to expand...

I hopefully answered all questions for you in your e-mail you sent me.
If you need any other help, just reply back or PM me.

FYI starting a new thread just for your build might also be a good idea as you can use it as a reference in the future.