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| 1 | +--- |
| 2 | +title: pfSense, The Humble Beginning (Homelab V1) |
| 3 | +date: 2020-08-30 |
| 4 | +--- |
| 5 | + |
| 6 | +With my first virtulization server project in the works, there is still one major hurdle I have to get past before I can really get to work on that. My college dorm internet. This thread will be all about my findings and experience with pfSense, the first addition to my first homelab. |
| 7 | + |
| 8 | +## Problems to Solve |
| 9 | + |
| 10 | +1. My dorm only gives me a single ethernnet jack with a single connection, I’d like to be able to manage and switch that connection. |
| 11 | + |
| 12 | +1. There is no way for me to port forward on my dorm connection, so even though I have 400 up and down, I can’t really host anything. |
| 13 | + |
| 14 | +1. I’d like to be able to remote into my network without making everything public to the entire dorm. (I can see everyone’s game consoles when I open spotify) |
| 15 | + |
| 16 | +## The Hardware |
| 17 | + |
| 18 | + |
| 19 | + |
| 20 | +Originally serving time in use in an ASU linux development class, this box eventually made it into a lot of “computer parts” in a surplus auction. A friend and I got a couple of these along with a bunch of other disregarded university hardware for basically nothing (ASU also did not bother clearing off the drive). This box ended up being a really good canidate for pfSense. |
| 21 | + |
| 22 | +- CPU: Intel Atom D510 ( [email protected], 13W) |
| 23 | +- RAM: 1GB DDR2 |
| 24 | +- HDD: WD Scorpio Blue 160GB |
| 25 | +- MOBO: 1 SODIMM Slot, 2 1GIG Ethernet, VGA, Lots of Serial |
| 26 | + |
| 27 | +The CPU actually ended up being a lot more than I thought it would be. I was expecting 1c2t honestly. I could get some mildly serious stuff running on here with just a simple RAM upgrade. That plus the dual 1GIG ports made this almost perfect for my first pfSense box. |
| 28 | + |
| 29 | +## Setup |
| 30 | + |
| 31 | +Setup was actually pretty painless all things considered. The only issue I faced was some wonky stuff with the bootable USB drive I had with the pfSense iso on it constantly formatting itself for no reason. After that, I followed the guided setup, plugged into the LAN port to finish things up, and that was it. For open-source router software, that was way more plug-and-play than I expected. |
| 32 | + |
| 33 | + |
| 34 | + |
| 35 | +Hopefully this will allow me to not raise too much suspicion if someone were to check the dorm network. A device named “xbox 360” on ethernet pumping out a lot of encrypted traffic looks normal right? |
| 36 | + |
| 37 | + |
| 38 | + |
| 39 | +Currently, I’m simply using one of the ports on the pfSense box for my WAN interface and the other for my LAN interface going straight into a tiny, USB powered, unmanaged switch. As my homelab scales up, this will definitely be a canidate for an upgrade. This tiny thing doesn’t like it when running local iso transfers to my server and other downloads at the same time. I’d like to get a rack-mountable managed cisco switch as I am very familiar with the Cisco iOS and could easily set up VLANs and ACLs on it. |
| 40 | + |
| 41 | +## First Homelab Evolution |
| 42 | + |
| 43 | +I never actually ended up finishing this writeup back in 2020, but I recently came across more photos of my first College Dorm Homelab and I thought I would document how it evolved here. |
| 44 | + |
| 45 | +Shortly after first setting up my pfSense router and hooking it up *only* to my gaming PC. |
| 46 | + |
| 47 | + |
| 48 | +Then I got in the ebay parts for my first Proxmox server, that I threw into come massive consumer PC case. |
| 49 | + |
| 50 | + |
| 51 | +Getting your first enterprise hardware is such a fun moment, I thought it was *so cool* how many cores I had. |
| 52 | + |
| 53 | + |
| 54 | +Then I stuffed it all into the corner of my dorm. That small-form-factor gaming PC build wasn't making a whole bunch of sense at this point. |
| 55 | + |
| 56 | + |
| 57 | +Homelabbers first VMs: |
| 58 | + |
| 59 | + |
| 60 | +Naturally, the first thing I did was spin up an OpenVPN Cloud tunnel so that I could watch Plex on my laptop during my campus job. |
| 61 | + |
| 62 | + |
| 63 | +Then I got my first rackmount case and moved everything from my Proxmox server over. Notice how the back doesn't close all the way :) |
| 64 | + |
| 65 | + |
| 66 | +It definitely wasn't the nicest thing I've ever built. |
| 67 | + |
| 68 | + |
| 69 | +Soon I came up with the amazing idea that the power in my dorm was free, so I could start bitcoin mining on a Windows VM. |
| 70 | + |
| 71 | + |
| 72 | +That poor usb-powered ethernet switch was starting to bottleneck me, so I finally got the long needed networking upgrade the lab needed. Now I had my own Wi-Fi network I could connect my phone and laptop to so I could access my lab from those devices without a VPN. I actually still use this switch to this day, mounted to the ceiling of my garage to power my IP Cameras. |
| 73 | + |
| 74 | + |
| 75 | +Check out that old Unifi UI |
| 76 | + |
| 77 | + |
| 78 | +Then, it was time for another server, and boy did she have drive bays |
| 79 | + |
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