How to turn your pc into a firewall.

In today's world of internet and personal computers we all need a all in one solution for our SOHO ( Small Office/ Home Office ) businesses which is protect our network from unauthorised access, provide DHCP solutions to our network with some advanced features like mac binding, do the DNS job for our network and work like a proxy between internet and our clients in local network.

You can Learn more interesting things on - www.itsupportwale.com

So friends we come here with a awesome opensource free software which can do the all thing alone. Yes you read it absolutely right, its an opensource platform which means you dont need to pay a single penny to anyone on the earth for using this software. However they offer there membership and donation links for funding their projects.

The name of this software is pfSense® - World's Most Trusted Open Source Firewall. Yes you can visit the above website and gather some more information about it. We will discuss as we can on this blog and we show you how to install it and how can we configure it.


Before we guide you to download this software this is important to you that you know these few things about this software platform :
  1. The pfSense project is a free network firewall distribution, based on the FreeBSD operating system with a custom kernel and including third party free software packages for additional functionality.
  2. It has successfully replaced every big name commercial firewall you can imagine in numerous installations around the world, including Check Point, Cisco PIX, Cisco ASA, Juniper, Sonicwall, Netgear, Watchguard, Astaro, and more.
  3. pfSense software includes a web interface for the configuration of all included components. There is no need for any UNIX knowledge, no need to use the command line for anything, and no need to ever manually edit any rule sets. 
  4. pfsense is a operating system means you need to install it on your hard drive or you can install it on virtual machine for the work around.
  5. There are several methods of installing pfsense on your hardware. Most common method is from using a CD or DVD and burn it with the ISO of pfsense and install from it other is from using bootable USB stick.
So the netxt step is choosing hardware for your pfsense installation according to your needs. Well when we talking about minimum requirements of this platform it can work on even oldest machine you have. But if you need to use it in production environment and you expect performance from it you need to choose a better option.

For basic features of pfsense like firewall, dns, dhcp you don't actually need any heavy hardware but when it comes to use it as a squid proxy server as well, you need to take at-least   an i3 or i5 and 8Gigs of ram for 100-200 pc network.

When selecting hardware for a new build, carefully consider current and future hardware requirements. These include:


  • 64-bit Intel or AMD CPU (x86-64, amd64) on pfSense 2.4 and later (Q2 2017)
  • CPUs must have AES-NI support on pfSense 2.5 and later (TBD, 2018+)
  • Must be able to boot from USB or optical drive and run the installer on pfSense 2.4 and later


64-bit or 32-bit


pfSense supports both 64-bit (amd64) and 32-bit (i386) architectures. The amd64 platform works on current x86-64 hardware from Intel, AMD, etc. If the hardware is capable of using a 64-bit operating system, then run the amd64 version.

So now you have much information about pfsense firewall and we can move on to download and installation of the pfsense.

Please follow this is to the page where we discuss and demonstrate how we can install it on our Hard Drive or in a virtual machine.

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