pfSense

My network at mom’s is now running off pfSense! I took Zombie 6, gave it a second ethernet card I bought from the school, and installed from the LiveCD. Fairly simple, it even let me figure out which card was which by plugging it into the switch! That was cool. The install was uneventful. It started working! I configured the port forwarding and even some fancy DNS options I’d been looking forward to. The domains I host now go straight to the LAN IP of the server when accessed from within the LAN. I think before that it was going out to AT&T and back. DNS seems much faster, although I haven’t put it through a scientific test, nor do I intend to at this point. I set the pfSense box to query the AT&T DNS servers that the modem was querying, although I’m not entirely sure if it’s doing that. Then it broke. I spent what I’m pretty sure was hours going over the configuration of the modem and pfSense box. Then I turned on the monitor, and it was spamming errors which I now unfortunately cannot remember. Google revealed that it was a problem with the PCI bus and ethernet card I bought from the school. (10/100 Mbits, WAN side, a Gigabit card is LAN side) I took down the machine and moved the card to another slot. It started working again, then failed in the same way. I swapped it with the ethernet card in my sister’s machine. It worked instantly in the pfSense box! After another reboot and some nagging, the other card started working on my sister’s Ubuntu box. I then, after some effort, set my Linksys router to be a switch and wireless access point. I had to set the advanced routing option to router instead of gateway, disable its DHCP server, assign it an IP out of the router’s DHCP range, and plug one of the LAN ports (not the uplink!) into the pfSense router. Hooray! The only problems out of all this are that Xfire file transfer didn’t work when Brad tried to send me a file, although it worked a few minutes later for Pat, so whatever, and that for some reason my SRCDS server can’t be seen from the Internet now. I’ll have to check the pfSense forums when I get time, and if worst comes to worst there’s always commercial support… Zoneclient is awesome. I was able to just point it at the modem connection status page, from which it found and used the IP. Surprisingly easy.

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