Turn your PC into a ROUTER - pfSense Virtualization/VLANs on your Home Server - Setup Guide

[@PoeLemic]

This is one of the best tutorials ever on how to virtualize PfSense. Thank you for covering this. So glad that I subbed to yoru channel. You have great content.

[@RaidOwl]

Thank you so much!

[@johnconnorstopskynet]

Dude you are the absolute champion! I am new to this sort of thing, self taught doing a home lab server and your tutorial was the only one that was comprehensive enough to get it up and running. Before I was on the wrong track trying to enable iommu and all this other stuff not sure what I was doing but you are a very good teacher thank you so much.

[@ptsakthivel1466]

THIS WAS THE ONLY VIDEO THAT HELPED, why was it not at the top of the search !! Thank you !!!!

[@at906]

Nicely done! Walked me through exactly what I needed to know.

[@stevendonaldson1216]

I'm here to tinker. I'll be using vlans and hopefully PF sense to protect my wife's work-from-home network from my tinkering. I love these Home server and home networking topics.

[@lordbyoss1106]

this is a fantastic video. Running PFsense in a VM is something I also want to do rather soon, ill definitely be using this video as a guide.

[@RaidOwl]

Awesome! It was way easier than I expected. Let me know how it goes for you.

[@MrDenzo1]

@@RaidOwl no need to delete the default firewall rules, just put the created rule above the default and it takes priority.

[@danielb1588]

Exacly what I was looking for and very well explained. Thank you. Subbed

[@victor2410]

I’m running opnsense bare metal but I might spin up and maintain a vm as a backup so I can quickly swap over if I have hardware failure and minimize downtime… great video!

[@g4egk]

Thanks for the guide. Had to Google how to upload an ISO. Some of the screens when creating a VM now have additional options in proxmox 7.2 but still easy to follow along. Great channel!

[@buildfrom]

Very thorough guide/tutorial. Thank you.

[@UltimateJiuJitsu]

Great video, content & presentation.. perfect! Looking forward to seeing more networking stuff..

[@RaidOwl]

I have a few networking videos planned!

[@UltimateJiuJitsu]

@@RaidOwl just listening and looking at your topology on this video really opened my eyes to all the possibilities you have by adding switches and VLANs.

[@lonlown]

Very straight forward tutorial! From PH with love!

[@radium6454]

Great video as usual, thanks a lot.

[@chinonjoku4298]

Magnificent! Well said

[@khalidelgazzar]

Great video, thank you 😊

[@SJTravel]

Best tutorial!🥰

[@NguyenCungHoaHien]

Exactly what I needed, many thanks!

[@RaidOwl]

You’re quite welcome!

[@josealfredfernandes]

​@@RaidOwlpc specs?

[@johnnyg3606]

This REALLY helped me out! Thanks mate!

[@cbw56]

Excellent video!! Thank you!!

[@JaZzDeOliveira]

Hi, Do you know how I could enable my computers that obtains network access from the virtual pfsense to be able to reach the proxmox servers webinterface? So for example if I have a virtual PC like in your video receiving its network from the virtual pfsense, how would I then allow for that virtual PC to be able to reach the proxmox interface?

[@Lambd4971]

Awesome video, thanks! Could you run pfsense on a WAN-less LAN? No internet connection, just a managed switch with cameras, WAPs, pfsense server/appliance, etc., and use pfsense to configure the VLANS?

[@brunekxxx91]

0:40 Haha, i actually don't have. Im watching this though cellular 😂

[@clsferguson]

useful guide. thank you.

[@TheZeroblues]

great job. thanks

[@kouros0]

Have you done a video that you use your router as a switch and wifi?

[@jitheshnikhilvaz8047]

how to configure windows server 2008 r2 point to domain via pfsense over internet anywhere in the world

[@kevinhughes9801]

Great vid thanks

[@julian.morgan]

Question about power efficiency: I have an old Haswell era 4 core CPU and an ITX motherboard with 2 x Gigabit ports - I also have a four port Gigabit PCIe card I could add in. I have loaded this up with various router software OS's just to play around with, (pfSense, OPNsense, OpenWRT etc) and while it works fine, I also think it's probably overkill as a standalone router on a small home network in terms of 24/7 power consumption - as it currently has 8GB RAM and it probably doesn't need to run all four cores. Also just common sense - it's probably an order of magnitude more powerful than the puny CPU in my off the shelf router, even when only using two of its four cores. So my question is how good is Proxmox at switching off (as in not drawing power) if at the set up stage I only assigned two cores and 4GB of RAM? i.e. would virtualising the install really reduce power consumption - or conversely if it was a bare metal install, would it simply conserve power by just not using CPU and RAM it doesn't need? Might it even run cooler and more efficiently by spreading the load across the four cores?

[@lenschulwitz1934]

Hitting the space bar to select the disk (9:57) was not intuitive, thank you.

[@b4g4b3l]

is the process the same in truenas as in proxmox, could you do a video pls ? :)

[@shashankbharadwajs9569]

Great video as always!. I love watching your content. I would like to request you to do a video on how to add a domain name to the applications running in promox vm.. like if i want to expose a wordpress site on different vm's or if i want to host my nextcloud instance to the subdomain. Im currently running it all using nginx proxy and apache. I want to learn proxmox and would really appreciate it if you could take your time out for a dedicated video. There are not many sources online for this. Thank you :D

[@chiefbeats0817]

I’m not a networking expert. Would following this for the purposes of a router coming from my ISP work? I want to turn my ISP-provided router back in to my ISP and use my own. Instead of getting another unit, I’m considering using my existing PC with a virtual router on it to supply internet to my home network. I’m assuming this will be setup like your Netgate router with pfsense on it to handle the ISP traffic, correct? In that case, would I still follow this video exactly for the configuration? Thanks!

[@Artcro]

is it possible to passthrough all from proxmox and use pfsense to get internet to the hypervisor? So not to expose proxmox to web (since i have no firewall before proxmox)

[@chabuki69]

can you make video using opnsense

[@SuperHakil]

hello I want to knows if its possible to create sub-interfaces from 1 LAN port. exemple you used network card with 4 ports, so can you create 8 VLANs ? thank you

[@GillySqueeze]

Looking for a 10Gbe card for my pfsense build any suggestions

[@presunic]

Hello there! I would like to ask you a question, If I plan on using pfsense and pihole only for the VMs on a home server, do I need a network card?

[@RaidOwl]

Are you running it in Proxmox? If so then no you don’t need an additional network card. Just create a Linux Bridge and use that as your new VLAN in pfSense.

[@pixoterenton1198]

How do you do the connections on Ubuntu or debian without using desktop gui

[@RaidOwl]

SSH

[@pixoterenton1198]

@@RaidOwl the interfaces not ssh, for the ip

[@pixoterenton1198]

figured it out, if you can only make for example your 10. Etc.. dmz, would you just foward that wan ip to lan to control the traffic to other vms, or they both have to be on the same subnet

[@shetuamin]

Like it.

[@frempongadarkwa2232]

Hello there I just watch this tutorial and I need help , I have a unify switch 16 , router/cabel modem, Dell poweredge R720 with four Nics with ESXI install. How do I make the connection for pfsense to work. Do I connect all the NICS to the unify switch wand then connect the router/modem to the switch for WAN part to work ? Or do I connect of the poweredge R720 NIC to the router. Currently, I have connected all my 4 NICS of the Poweredge server to unify switch and then I have connected the router/cable modem to the switch but I don’t see it working. Kindly help

[@RaidOwl]

Are you getting any traffic to the NIC? Can you see the NIC within ESXI? Are the Linux Bridge connections configured? All of this has to be working before running pfSense.

[@fiercebon14]

Noob here 🙋🏽‍♂️ I’m trying to set up fq_codel so that I lower latency on a hotspot which I’m currently using as my only connection to one device, does making a virtual lab apply to me or is this not necessary in my case?

[@Blacksheep-ik7gx]

Anyone please feel free to answer. I want to turn my old desktop into a pfsense router/firewall and of course I would need another NIC to add more ports. Could I just buy a managed switch instead of a NIC and route everything through the switch?

[@1hung2lomofo84]

i need to know the same as im using a mini desktop that doesnt have extra expansion ports for a NIC

[@ourkid2000]

Could you attach a USB 3.0 to Ethernet adapter to the USB port and use that as your second connection?

[@RaidOwl]

Interesting idea…I’m honestly not sure. I may have to try it.

[@7ick725]

It should work, I have seen it done on Intel NUC. You may just be passign through a USB device vs a Network device.

[@MrMackster01]

One thing I’m confused about, is in your diagram, you don’t have your new pfsense router directly connected to your ISP Gateway. Wouldn’t that introduce a lot of double-NAT headaches?

[@RaidOwl]

Yes, in retrospect I would have done that but I was more concerned about showing what’s possible. If you can get your configurations set up properly then this setup would work but I’d recommend just going directly to the modem.

[@MrMackster01]

@@RaidOwl thank you for clarifying! I have a UniFi UDMP and I’ve wanted to add pfsense for it’s much improved firewall and vpn for my torrent server 😎! This video showed me how! Thank you!!

[@RaidOwl]

Awesome! I hope you enjoy pfSense as much as I do haha

[@soloxplatano]

I've tried looking it up but is there a benefit to buying a Netgate router instead of virtualizing? or would it not matter?

[@RaidOwl]

Buying a Netgate router gives you access to the pfSense+ edition rather than the community edition. Netgate claims to put more work on improving the Plus version moving forward. As of right now there isn’t much difference.

[@soloxplatano]

@@RaidOwl gotcha good to know!

[@shingles1465]

can this work for a local area network offline or does it need wifi? because I want something that could stream my steam games around the house I don't want it to stop working if there's no wifi/if wifi is down

[@RaidOwl]

Yeah you can certainly use this to set up a LAN without having to worry about a WAN connection

[@shingles1465]

@@RaidOwl oh that's cool I'll definitely have to try this out then

[@voodoovinny7125]

30GB HDD for pfSense?

[@thecrlghs]

Hey dude, love the content. Just some advice. You tend to randomly look “up” when talking. It’s oddly distracting. Try looking directly at the camera.

[@GillySqueeze]

Watching on my phone lol

[@rpsmith]

This setup is double NATing. Not a good way to access the Internet!

[@nicko530i]

Why? I mean, 20 years ago I would have agreed with you, but what are the disadvantages nowadays?

[@turcoscorner]

@@nicko530i Double NAT is against best practices, mainly because you will have problems with services that use more than one protocol like FTP and SIP for instance. But it's perfectly fine to do it on a lab environment, like the environment in this video

[@upsidedowntree9431]

@@nicko530i what better alternative do you suggest?

[@andrewchristiansen8311]

I wanna know how to do this on virtual box. One guy has a vid to set it up but no instructions on how to use pfsense as a router. You have a guide on that but do it in a VM I dont wanna use. I hate youtube. I have 3 network adapters and Virtual box only sees 2 idk why. This is a bunch of bs. Stop using generic nomenclature and describe everything as the same word like over ussing and improperly using 'interface'. I want to take in an ethernet connection from my modem. To my mobo ethernet. Then distribute it on a network ethernet, and a wifi pcie card. NOBODY has a video on this & its the OBVIOUS INTENDED USE OF THE SOFTWARE.

[@adairjanney7109]

isnt opnsense far superior

[@RaidOwl]

🤷🏻‍♂️

[@zulhilmizainudin]

Thank you for this great tutorial. I'm able to block devices in New VLAN (running in Proxmox) to devices in Main VLAN using your guide. Consider my whole setup is exactly like yours, how can we make devices in Main VLAN reach devices in the New VLAN? Diagram: i.imgur.com/G5T9jCR.png