Building A pfSense Router!

this is a router this is also a router and this is going to be a router and we're going to build it together [Music] so this is a netgear range max trademark wireless router wpn824 v2 i i've never used it but it's your standard wireless router that goes directly from your cable modem and hooks you up with four lan ports uh it's it's part switch it's parked wireless access point and for most people this thing is perfect but it was not perfect for me when my computers are all running and performing tasks a lot is happening in my network and it's very busy i have those computers in that rack over there constantly sending and receiving data from project servers i have computers that read me finance data because i'm one of those i may be in the middle of a zoom call and that's a lot to place on this guy this guy does not like all that stuff happening at one time and at a certain point when i added enough computers i would try to do facetime calls zoom calls discord video calls on this guy and did not no no not good so after taking out the trash you know this guy i did this this was my first solution it's a dell optuplex 990 it was one of my first dumpster finds and uh i knew at this point i was having more computers so i need something i needed something better to actually do the routing in my network so i threw in a network card and kind of see it down there um this is a network card from intel it is the i5 3 4 i don't know i'll put the i'll put the thing because i have no idea the naming you know but basically i i basically i set this thing up to be a router and with the network card in there i created four lan interfaces um that was so that i could uh divide the copper traces uh in this house so that i could have uh different circuits for different reasons and have uh have have it so that traffic doesn't compete as much with other traffic um but the problems with this is i've already had to replace the motherboard one time and i've had to replace the power supply as well and i'm just worried that i'll be in the middle of a presentation and this thing will just crap out on me and i'll be left in the dark with no replacement uh so we're gonna build in this this is going to be my new router and it's going to look a lot more professional than this all right so the first thing is the motherboard uh this is a mini itex motherboard that i found on ebay i don't remember the model name or company so i'll throw that in a little comment and then of course all of these items are in the description but i got this because for 65 dollars i got the motherboard the cpu which is an i3 3220 i got four gigs of ram and also this one used cpu cooler which is going to be really helpful and i would just install it as is but there is one thing this cpu is not going to work for me because it doesn't support aes and i which is an instruction set for aes encryption uh that a lot of older cpus don't have so i have an i5 2500 lying around and i'm going to replace this with that because the i5 supports asni [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Music] hmm [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] hmm [Music] [Music] all right um all of the wiring is done and i believe this is complete so we'll go on to test it um i lost the footage of the rest of that time lapse but i'll tell you what i did so first thing was i put the two and a half inch hard drive here um in its mount and it's connected through sata to here to the motherboard i got all of the wiring done and did some cable management or tried to but uh it is crazy trying to fit all of that wiring into this little this little cavity right here but it is all done um there are no usb 2 connectors on this motherboard that will support this format so i i went ahead and just forgot this because i'm not going to be using front usb so that doesn't really matter to me i'm just going to be working with the back also this pci riser cable it was the cheapest thing i could find but honestly if i went back and did this again i would just buy one of the pcb cards that just does a 90 degree because this it fits but i don't like how much flex there is there i'm also worried that this will touch the top so i put some electrical tape here just in case to make sure that if this edge does touch nothing is contacting and then i think that's about it the fans are connected i put the heat sink facing backwards since now that i don't have an io shield i think it makes sense to just try and get the heat out of the system uh this way so yeah now let's go and test it and see if it works at all all right moment of truth i have not turned it on yet but let's uh give it a go oh yeah oh all right we've got a green light on the motherboard here we go and we've got nothing nothing at all so i'm gonna uh look back at the motherboard diagram make sure that i've uh plugged in the front panel connectors correctly uh that might be my issue so i'm gonna go give that a try all right all i did was jiggle some things around and we've got a post screen and uh it's beeping it's doing all the things it needs to do and uh let's take a look and see what she does all right so not too bad so i need to power it back down again and uh install pf sense so uh let's go do that all right uh so it's about two weeks later um i sort of had to take a break from this video because i'm still in school and i just had a i just had finals week so it was very very very busy but uh we're here and i have the pf sense router in the rack um so i'll also probably make more videos about this rack i love it i have my ups down here i just put my pc in here and got my pc rack mounted with a long display port cable and usb interface i love this so much and i'll maybe talk about this computer this is like i put an optiplex into a rack mount case and it wasn't the easiest thing to do but i got it done and it's here i have the dell poweredge r2102 which is my nas but then everything up here is network interf or network infrastructure i suppose so the way that i have wired this right now i have wand coming in here just so that i could get it through the patch panel to the router and then the router splits off into four lan interfaces one goes to the switch which connects all these computers down here and plus some other things at my desk you can kind of see there's there's a lot of screens i might get my eyes damaged someday but i do wear blue light blocking glasses so don't worry that much or i guess i shouldn't worry that much but i am kind of worried still and then i have these three the three other land interfaces coming from the router these go to the other things around my house so i have two access points that are on one of these networks i have that server or you know the beowulf cluster i suppose is what it really is but it's just a cluster of computers on another interface and then i have a a final computer at my work bench that's sort of mounted under the desk to get sort of my workbench space clear still but still giving me a computer to work on if i need to um so that's pretty much it i will probably think about making a video about pf sense in the future also i just noticed how harsh the sunlight is coming through the window i'm sorry about that this is an iphone camera maybe if i do this enough i'll get a real camera and not have to worry as much about stuff like that but uh so someday i want to make a video on how to install and set up pfsense but i know there's already a lot of tutorials out there i sort of wanted to have fun building a new pc here um and uh i also am not a network engineer like fully fledged network engineer so i want to make sure that if i do a video like that i really have done my research into what i'm talking about so that i don't give any false information but i'll probably also talk a little bit about some of the packages which are which are one of the things that make me so excited about using pfsense it's that i can install different packages to do different things so i have one for ad blocking and stuff like that called uh pf blocker ng i also have one that tracks bandwidth usage among all the computers and devices on the network so i can see what's using the most traffic and i also have something really nice that interfaces with my ups and it sends me an email if the power ever goes down and it has to switch over to battery so it's really fun to play around with especially when i go out of the house and you know i might there might be a problem that i want to know about and then i'm thinking about other projects that i can do if i enjoy making these videos enough like i want to write something that if the power does go out it goes ahead and safely shuts down all my computers um all the really crucial ones and then starts them back up when the power comes back on something like that um but that is for a future date so yeah uh thank you so much for watching and i i had a lot of fun doing this and i hope you had fun watching and uh i'd love to hear what else uh you think i should do or cover i'll probably keep making videos about different projects that i take on that i just find really fun battle next this guy and i no longer wanted this to be the center of my network the most when my computers are all on and operating uh the network gets a lot gets uh i also may be in the middle of a zoom call and i don't want to be

Channel: Thomas Computes

Views: 47,518

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Id: IzjY6MvtKEs

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 25 2021