Now itll be obvious later in this tutorial, but addresses like 192.168.xxx can NOT uniquely identify you.

I had a few challenges and surprises along the way, spent literally hundreds of hours learning everything, and decided to create the guide I wish I had.

Once you have the hardware available and the basic planning done, it should be possible to set all of this up in just a single afternoon.

Heres the end goal: An easy to set up enterprise-grade solution for my home To get one of the questions out of the way for users questioning the security of virtualizing your firewall if an exploit becomes available that lets an attacker break out of a VM over the internet, theyre going to be too busy trolling the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and governments all around the world to worry about your home network.

The only real risk is if you make a misconfiguration, but frankly, thats pretty hard to do and this guide highlights those steps.

The benefits I can use the hardware for other things including for other network appliances like deep packet inspection.

When I get that up and running and am confident enough that I got it right, Ill share here.

Why Ive been running OpenWRT on consumer hardware for years, but it just kept letting me down.

Over the years, Ive accumulated a lot of IoT network junk and my Linksys router with OpenWRT was failing under the load.

The solution: PfSense Im also segregating my devices into VLANS.

I can put the devices I trust on one VLAN, and give them one-way access to everything.

The devices I dont trust are also on their own network, but the damage they can do is fairly limited.

Hack into my IoT light bulb Annoying, sure, but at least its not on a network with my credit card numbers.

Pfsense Software Stack Was

Ive done this with OpenWRT for years, but again, the hardware and software stack was just getting crushed under the weight of my network.

Pfsense Upgrade VERY Brief

Time for an upgrade VERY brief network crash course jump down to if you want.

Really, this is everything I wish I knew as an amateur before embarking on this journey.

I mean, I had a pretty good idea of basic IP addresses, DNS and the like.

IP Address 101 Its almost trivia, but the internet and IP addresses arent really synonymous (somebody could theoretically start a duplicate internet).

ICANN is the benevolent multi-national organization that sets up the rules for the internet.

Among these rules: Public IP addresses are assigned by RIR Regional Internet Registries.

Public IP addresses can be used to identify where you are, or at least down to your ISP.

Every time an ISP buys an IP address, this is registered in a database (accessible through an internet whois search).

This goes for both IPv4 and (the first few parts of) IPv6 addresses.

Pfsense 32 Bit Download