pfSense - old computer project

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Got a Cisco ASA firewall at home? If so, how about lending me a few hundred bucks? But for those of us who aren't loaded, that doesn't mean you can't have a kick-@ss, fully-featured hardware firewall, because if you've got (or can get) an old computer you can run pfSense, an easy-to-use open source firewall based on FreeBSD.

I had an old Asus motherboard with an AMD Athlon 64 3400+ and 1 GB of DDR1 RAM. It was from a friend's old computer, that he let me keep when I built him a new one a couple years ago. It had just been sitting in storage, so I grabbed a case and power supply I wasn't using, set the motherboard up, snagged a dual-port Intel NIC on eBay, got a new Kingston USB drive, got a few new fans and lights for the case, and installed pfSense Embedded. And I now have a shiny new hardware firewall that cost me about forty bucks.

Only real downside is that booting off the USB drive, it takes about 5 minutes to boot. But I don't plan to reboot it unless/until I move, so not a big deal. It can also be configured as a full install (with hard drives or SSDs), which enables additional features e.g. squid proxy server. But there are enough features with the embedded version (e.g. IPSec tunneling, snort intrusion detection, firewall-based network antivirus) to keep me busy learning new stuff for a while.

Anyway, if you're interested in networking this might be worth a look.

I use pfSense for my router. but I use it because I have 3 separate internet connection coming into my house and I need something to combined them into one single connection and pfSense does a good job at that.

I'd love to set up my own router once I get my own place, but as it is right now, I'm stuck with the POS router Telus gives out, as I'm fairly certain my landlord doesn't want me messing with it. I wonder if anyone's ever tried setting up a router that doubles as a server.