Create Your Own Router and Firewall Solution

pfSense Installation

One thing to note right away to this type of installation, your installed drive will be wiped clean. You’ll need to set it up manually if you want to dual boot with other systems. It’s unlikely to run a dual system on a 24/7 running headless system, but you never know.

Insert your newly created flash drive into the system and boot from it. If the installed disk doesn’t have anything installed, your system should boot from USB automatically. If not, then you’ll need to enter the BIOS or BIOS boot manager and select the USB flash drive to boot from.

The speed it takes to boot up the installation will highly depend on the speed of the flash drive you’re installing from. But even a standard USB 2.0 flash drive will be finished with everything in about 10 minutes.

After some time, the installation setup has loaded, and you get some options to chose from. But there’s a timer and a default selection, so you don’t need to do anything here. That is unless you’re having trouble installing it for some reason, then you can escape to the prompt and change variables and settings to make it work with your setup. But it’s unlikely to happen, and a quick Google search will tell you what you need to do.

The setup will continue to boot and load all the necessary files as you watch the progress; it isn’t the most exciting thing to do, but doesn’t take long.

A little later you get the option to run the Installer, which we want, or enter the recovery mode.

The installer only requires a few settings from us and there is a good chance that you don’t need to change anything at all.

Once we have accepted the firs settings, we get to install it. Only pick the first option for the quick and easy install and we’re on our way.

We get a final warning that this will erase all the content on our drive, but we are okay with that and will continue.

The setup will start, but don’t leave to make your tea just yet. There is one more thing that you need to confirm.

The final step in the installation is the kernel. We want the standard one, and that’s it. The installation will proceed and let notify you when once complete.

When done, you’ll need to reboot the system. You can remove your installation medium now and hit enter to reboot.

Now our system is restarting, and it tells us the default admin username and password that we’ll need to login to the graphic user interface.

During the boot, you’ll see this screen first. Don’t worry; it’s not an error even if it could look like a BIOS error screen. Just wait a few seconds, and it will continue.

During the boot, we get the chance to change in the boot, if we want. But we don’t, so don’t do anything. It will continue a few seconds later.

The general loading is now done, and we need to tell the freshly installed pfSense how to connect. First, it will ask us whether we need to set up VLANs first. If you don’t know what this is or if you need it, the chances are that you don’t. Just reply with an N and continue. Also, don’t be confused by the network connections suddenly showing up, telling you that the link state is UP. That’s simply the network connections getting through and it has no effect on what you’re typing or entering.

Next, we need to tell it which connection is our WAN and which is for our LAN connection. The simplest way to find out which is which, unplug a network cable and watch for the message. It will tell you that interface XXX is down and that it’s up when you plug it back in.

You get the chance to change this if you made an error, but if it’s correct, we will proceed by pressing ‘Y’.

And that’s it. Our new system has been installed and is ready for use. Our new system’s remote address can be seen on this screen too, so time to switch to the workstation and get going with the configuration of our new DIY firewall and router.