Is pfSense always this complicated? My Journey...

so I don't know where I'm going with this video but I'm gonna try to make it anyways pretty much I've spent the better part I'd say of about 10 to 11 hours messing with pfSense right probably eight of those hours were all last night and I I want to bang my head against the wall repeatedly until it bleeds first of all my experience with pfSense rather limited I've installed it I've tested I've got it working before but it was only like in a test environment sometimes I actually one time I did it in a virtual machine but I've never actually sat down and configured tried to configure it for deployment and by that I mean just swapping out my main router that I use now which is currently a tp-link to see 5400 so pretty much in order for me to deploy something on my network I have to go through a night to configure it and make sure that all of my stuff will work once I do the switch I want everything else inside my network configured to run configure to be assign the proper addresses you know everything that I have set up right now the IPS that I have assigned to devices on my house that are used to communicate with other stuff in my house servers and that sort of thing you know those all have dedicated IP addresses they have their own subnet you know they have to work a certain way and if if I don't have that option to make them work a certain way then I have to go back and reconfigure all of my other devices you know now I'm adding more cameras that I've have I have dedicated IPS four that are tied into the you know the DVR software that I'm running blue iris on top of servers and and file hosts and and backup destinations and all kinds of stuff that I have configured on my network that is actually the reason I don't know if you can see it up here but you have that Norton router right there that's a rat or that I've been messing with that is actually the reason why I I don't want to use that router as a daily driver and that's reason why I'm looking at pfSense because although I do like it and you guys can hate me all you want to but although I do like the added security that I get from that router it still limits my ability to control my network you know they've made it so simple that it's too simple that's great for someone like me who wants easy security but it lacks the ability to do simple things like change your subnet IP range you know like you're forced onto there you know IP range you can't change that and there's a few other examples but it's just it's limited by network configuration where I could still use it potentially if I were to go through and reconfigure everything else on my network but I don't want to do that you know what I mean so anyways back to the point of hand I have been working better part I don't know what I say like 10 or 11 hours on this now this is the byte 3 miniature PC from Azul they sent me this for review because I you know do a lot of like Plex related content and this is you know supposed to be a media player and it was it was a good media player but the thing is is that this the Apollo Lake CPU in here this handles encryption that pfSense you utilizes that's I forgot what's called AES or something like that but it handles the encryption and the pfsense uses so that's good it's got 4 cores with 4 gigabytes of RAM which is you know recommended for PF sense it's got a built in 30-some gigabyte flash memory drive which is great just for the installation you can install you know other stuff like MDOT - SSDs or you can install just a regular SATA SSD so you can have additional caching drives installed in this if you wanted to so on the surface this thing is damn near perfect for pfSense built with one exception and that exception is it only comes with one Nick one network interface card one LAN port I know that you can go through and you can set up VLANs and you can use utilize the same port in some kind of you know which crafter II you know and turn it in but I don't want that right I want dedicated ports you know I don't want any hindered speed any transfer issues between you know computer like I just want I want dedicated ports I know it sounds dumb but that's what I want so this is what I did i I wanna after I reviewed this and I checked it out and I said you know what this has all the pieces that I need except for a port or additional LAN ports so I went online and I bought a star tech it's a USB type-c connection right here I mean actually so I bought this star tech it's a USB type-c connection it goes from type C to rj45 no this is USB 3.1 gin1 five gigabits per second now this is pretty fast of course and USB type threes is or a USB 3.0 is as fast as well but I bought this thinking you know maybe this might have lower latency it's gonna be super fast it's gonna be you know just a great mix overall and you know the bike three supports Type C connection so that I mean why not funny part is this device with a Type C connection was literally the first USB type-c device I have ever used I've ever plugged into anything I've never even I've handled a Type C cable but I've never actually plugged it in and used it so you know funny you know just a little full side note there and then because most of time when I do stuff I run into issues I actually ordered this it's a USB 3.0 to rj45 now this is still fast it's still gonna give me the speed I mean it's USB 3.0 but I wanted to make sure I wanted to try to get the type-c working just so I could try to avoid any kind of you know latency issues or you kind of you know decrease in speed you know wanted to put under pressure that sort of thing not that I had any merit you know to that assumption you know no merit whatsoever but I wanted to try type-c and then fall back on 3.0 if needed or for that matter just have both of them installed and have two ports on them on the actual device itself so I got these I ordered these I posted it on Twitter and then somebody had you know donated the money that I spent on these to me and kind of lit a fire in my ass because now I have somebody that actually paid me money to work on this PS since bill died I feel like a obligated so which is good actually because this is the complexity of this project so far is one of those things where I have a lot of stuff to work on specifically I got an idea for this norton core router that i want to work on in some other videos so things get pushed back a lot this is actually kept me motivated so that's good and I want to think I don't remember your name but I want to thank you ever donated that money you know to pay for the pfSense parts or the Knicks for this I definitely appreciate that you didn't have to but since you did love you so back to where we are so I spent a bunch of time on this thing I installed pfsense I rent went through the installation and I try to fumble around myself right I try to get it working myself and I had some of the most ridiculous issues you know the first and foremost like when I started to get everything set up the way on the way I'm doing this by the way because I'm pre setting it up before I deploy it is that the way in port is connecting to my switch that's behind my main router right so this is a router behind a router and I'm doing it like this because I want to run basically this you know pfsense build to where it's only connected to two computers once my test box that's that i7 computer that I've used you know plex testing and you know I used to use it for DVR surveillance testing and you know it's just kind of a generic box I'd go to it's a fallback computer so I have two things connected to it so I have that text box test box and then I have my main computer that of course allows me to configure and do stuff on my main computer so but it is behind my main router so I'm obviously I'm gonna be pulling a DHCP IP address from my main router not that big of a deal and then but what but when I got everything set up and I had you know the way and connected to my switch I was able to connect to it via the IP address that my router assigned to of my main router assigned to this box as soon as I added the LAN port right that that land NIC and it came up and has started running I lost all connection through the Wayne board could not connect it or connect to it by going through my other router it just would not be accessible it's Sunday morning or Saturday morning and this is coffee but anyways it was not accessible and I was dealing with that for a while longer longer than I needed to and I was dealing with that because I plugged in the LAN port into my computer to the second rj45 port I have or the ethernet port that I have on my computer and I couldn't get it to connect or be assigned an IP address so I couldn't connect to the way in to configure the web GUI anymore and I couldn't connect through the land either and I couldn't get an IP address or I couldn't get any kind of network connectivity and here's the fun part when you're doing stuff like this when you get into something and you've been dealing with something you dedicate like two or three hours to it then you realize it was something stupid that you did right something idiotic just downright I don't want to say the r-word because someone's probably gonna get triggered but just pretty much downright just that right and that was that I previously for whatever reason configured that NIC to have a dedicated IP address internally right a dedicated IP address so it was not pulling a DHCP address it was trying to dedicate itself to the IP address that I specified and that and the reason why this doesn't work is because I was changing the sub hype e net the 192.168.1.1 ever I changed it dot 2 dot whatever right so that way I could go through and configure and make sure it would work in etc all I had to do is go in there and switch the IP range for the DHCP and I'd be set up and ready to go so I was hassled with this for a couple hours and I spent now know two three hours trying to figure this out I couldn't get it to connect I I mean it was just it was a pain in the butt and then I finally realized I had a switch back to kcp and then all of a sudden I was able to access the web GUI from the land port still can't do it from the homes from the LAN port but I could connect to it from the LAN port so that was a stupid hurdle and I say this I tell you this because you know I try to make polished videos on projects that I work on stuff that I do and most the time I don't I don't go through the headaches I don't walk you through the headaches that I go through which because you want to make a Polish video you know you want at least some what look like you know what you're doing but in reality I got the funny thing about knowing what you're doing is that it's kind of boring for me anyways sure you can you can know how to do something and repeat it over and over again and that's great you become very proficient with it you basically become a professional but where's the fun in that so I get into things I don't know which is why pfsense always intrigued me because I don't know it I'm very limited in links Linux commands SSH that sort of thing it's all a learning experience for me sometimes even when I learn it I forget it so I can learn it over and over again the point was is that you know stupid things like that can can cost you the hours hours of messing around with it to try to figure out how to get it up and running rebooting and reimaging it and trying everything he can to like what the hell is going on and then you realize oh I'm an idiot fast-forward a little bit but I was able to connect to the land I was able to configure it get it up and running and then I had Internet access whatsoever right I connected to the way into the switch of course I had that still connected that I had the lane connected to the pfSense box no internet connection could not figure it out I knew that the pfSense box had access to the Internet I pray by verified that I had access could not figure that out did some Google research thankfully this was not much longer than a 15 minute diagnostic thing but I found out that the firewall is aggressive as and it has a default rule where it just blocks everything right so now once you realize that you go in there you open up everything and then you have access to the Internet problem solved then I go through I'm like ok cool I get everything configured I'm able to connect to the internet everything looks peachy then I decide to add the second Nick ok this time I did some pre you know research how do you how do you add another Nick and still you have it use your subnet and and I was able to get everything configured and bridged and that was all peachy whose greats got that done got that set up and then I move on to the the next thing which was utilizing squid I've known the squid for a while I've known of its existence I've messed around tried to get it working before and if you don't know what squid is a squid there's a proxy server the integration with with them I think it's clam virus scanner you know that squid is basically what's going to one filter content that you choose not that I need that I just want to get it running I don't actually want to filter anything but I just want to prove that I can get it running and then you can also scan and block harmful websites or downloads right so that is basically the protection and what's really bringing that up again as this norton court right the norton core has that built in and it's super simple they set up and it's just it can block you know certain things filter certain things whatever so that's what I was trying to set up was the PF sense you know management system that allows you to you know filter and block certain things and really to me is the PF sense the firewall but that's built in that was the motive the main attraction you know sure you get more control you know you can see more activity on your network you can log stuff you can you know you can do caching there's a lot of benefits to PF sense things that have eluard me too you know to the pfSense bill for a while I just haven't you know dove into this deep but the main thing has been able to you know control your network you know secure your network and just manage everything more hands on as long as you can get it set up so I get that installed and I can't get it to run I can't get the service to start it says it's starting I can't get to hit that virus to run I just I dick around with it for so long trying to get it running myself finally I uninstalled squid install everything related I look up YouTube videos I'm watching tutorials step by step I'm gonna walk walking through the screen step by step and then you know it doesn't work still right and this is last night it's like one o'clock in the morning last night or this morning I guess and it just it didn't work you know and I followed this you know the tutorial was step by step right I mean what did I mess up I figured and I don't know for sure this is basically where I am right now this is my video that I'm making this is this is the point that I'm at right now I've concluded to myself be it true or not that the fumbling around that I did and pfSense before I decided to look up YouTube videos and tutorials or online write-ups the fumbling around that I did most likely has conflicted with what I would try to do later right with YouTube videos with tutorials I've added and removed a bunch of stuff I've changed things I've I've made you know setting configurations that I didn't really I knew kind of what they were but not really what they should be you know I've made so many so many alterations to pfsense and pfsense add-ons that even if I uninstall it there's a lot of configuration stuff that I remember changing they're still there that I think I'm just I'm muddied the water and in my experience you know with my limited experience I don't think I have the ability to undo the damage and I before so here's where I am now basically I'm going to start over this is pfSense right this is what I use to install it before I'm going to start over I'm going to reimage it I'm going to set it up just enough to get connected to the Internet and just you know get up and running and I am going to start over and I want to say this before I jump to the next part of this video that firewall on pfsense is almost too aggravating I mean I get a lot of firewall logs saying that a bunch of stuff is blocked and I know that a lot of that has to do with things on my network being behind a pfSense and right or I'm sorry in front of pfSense because it's picking up things like you know network communication between my wife's laptop or my my camera is that sort of thing and it's blocking a lot of stuff like that but it's kind of annoying when you have to nix installed right you have two of these one goes to your test computer the other goes to your main computer and you wanted to do something simple right simple like an eye perf test which is just a throughput you know tester between two computers on your internal network and the firewall blocks it right there's you have you have rules in there that say you know open up everything allow everything don't block anything right and it doesn't matter still blocking it because it's a giant piece of at least that's what goes through my head so and the aggravating part here is that if I connect my test box through this or whatever one of these and then I connect my main computer just directly to my switch bypassing pfsense I can run iperf right and then if I connect both of them one to each one I can't if I connect my computer through pfsense and my test box bypass pfSense I can run I curve but again you connect them both you can't do it and then this gets soaked I I haven't figured this part out and this is so frustrating to me then you go in and you're tired of with a firewall you hate it at this point you just want to test your stuff then you go in to the general settings right and you completely disable any filtering right you turn the firewall off you check the little box you hit save right and then all of a sudden both computers that are connected through the Nix separate NICs dedicated NICs both computers are able to communicate with each other via iperf and run the iperf test right you think Eureka now firewall is it I just got to learn the firewall but then your internet goes down neither one of your computers have access to the Internet you can communicate with each other but you can't communicate to the Internet why the is it like that I don't know I cannot understand rebooted it I've just made the change rebooted it and I've done I don't know why that does not work and it frustrates the living hell out of me yeah and you might think well that's not that big of a deal right why is it that you wanted to disable the firewall that's the whole point of pfSense and I 110 percent agree with you however and before I deploy this I wanted to run some tests right I wanted to see what kind of limited communication or what kind of degradation of speed am I going to have utilizing these you know USB connected NICs am I going to have any kind of speed hindrance because I'm running through USB connected NICs that was my biggest concern if you're right if you want to run a pickup and I perf test right through a firewall you're gonna obviously have some limit you know some degradation of speed there because you know or you're gonna obviously have some loss of speed there at least in my head I'm not gonna expect the firewall in a router to perform as as fast as a dummy switch you know as far communicating between computers so I wanted to see you know what kind of speed difference about half so if only just for testing I wanted to see how fast it would be but I can't can't get access to the Internet with it turned off so yeah I can't say this I did run a lot of tests with speed tests with and without the PF since connected or going through or going around the pfSense box and as far as my network connectivity outside my network I do not notice any difference in speed so that's good right but every not everything's outside you know there's a lot of internal communication on my network so it's only one one small step and the grand scheme of things so anyways now I'm gonna reimage this thing and I'm going to start over I'm gonna try to record what I'm gonna do software wise but yeah I don't know how long it's gonna take I know since I spent like eight hours last night on this I doubt I'm gonna I'm gonna record eight hours of me messing around with it hopefully I've learned enough that I'm not gonna have eight hours with the stuff but either way that's what I'm gonna do now and I just recorded for 24 minutes me rambling also my lights not on I'm changing the game a little bit here too um before I had each NIC dedicated itself right into a computer so now what I'm gonna do to change it up is what I'm gonna do to now is change it up is I'm just gonna have one Nick because I ran into some issues trying to figure out bridging and all that I don't know I think I got it set up right but just think taking out more variables I'm gonna hook one Nick up to this and use this as a switch so that's gonna be the different way of doing it and hopefully more simple way of doing it okay so it's now like seven ish and I've been working on this most of the day I've taken a few breaks you know got sidetracked in a little bit of you know a TD but right now I'm actually up and running and I have everything configured and what I wanted to work is working so it's been a productive day and it's definitely been a learning experience now where I left off was is that I was reprogramming this machine with a new copy of PF sense and basically starting over because I was following tutorials online and it didn't work for me so I figured I screwed something up turns out that I didn't screw anything up the tutorial that I was watching was for 2.3 or something version 2.3 and the pfSense I'm running is 2.4 so I don't know if that's the reason why it didn't work or why the settings were different but basically in the video that I was watching it was said to not enable transparent something transparent proxy and nothing would work for me still after got everything set up but I enabled transparent proxy and then all of a sudden everything worked so basically the of it is is that if I would have enabled that on the previous version that I had up and running and installed and ready to go that I could have saved myself 3 or whatever hours that I spent around with it the next time around so yeah that's fun 2.4 transparent proxy is the way to go once I did that everything worked I was able to get okay let's back up so I went through and I installed everything from scratch you know III installed squid the squid light squid lights the reporting thing I think the the proxy server the filtering service I said what I wanted the filter which wasn't really much I'm just more of testing things at this point I did a test where I blocked it by my bits comm just to make sure that was working then I enabled later on I enabled a clam antivirus got that working and verified that that was working so this was a long process I do have a lot of video of me recording what I was doing because if I failed it was gonna post it online and ask for help but everything's working so I'm not gonna bore you with all the little details like that but so I went through and installed everything and then a user on Twitter was just like aw don't use quit anymore I use PF blocker squids out-of-date it's a piece of crap you can't really say that but he did mention that PF blocker in G was kind of the new thing I did some research on that real quick and a lot of people use squid and PF blocker for different reasons but simultaneously so I also installed that got that working I added some definitions or some lists to that for blocking basically entire countries from in like incoming connections to my network so for whatever reason if China wanted to try to hack me I don't know if they would obviously they won't but if China or Russia wanted to hack my network they would have to either a master IP or or use a proxy going through a u.s. IP or B they would get blocked because they had a China based IP address so I added that so I added the the PF block or the squid the firewall the antivirus got everything up and running it is awesome now I'm on to my next challenge and I'm sure I could figure it out but I'm on my next challenge where remember this thing okay I just want to say first of all I was misguided when I was planning on using this in my attic and the reason why I say that is because I thought to myself you know what I could probably get away putting this in the attic but I should probably put it in my garage right so doesn't overheat but in reality my garage was overheated anyway so even if this would have worked you know hooking up my unified g3 camera there's a huge possibility that would have been overheating and having issues so I'm glad that it didn't work that way you know when summer comes around I don't have problems that's a side note so getting distraction so now I want to reconfigure this to ACS or ACM 3200 I mean this is a nice router I'm not actually gonna use this I like my C 5400 but I'm gonna reconfigure this is just a wireless access point and on my now I have my pfSense router now I set things up pretty much to where I only have one connected rj45 adapter I wanted to but I only have one and maybe later on I'll try to figure out the bridging and see if I have any issues with that but for now this is working so it's like if it ain't broke don't fix it I have that hooked up to my switch one is going okay so this comes from the router this one is going to yeah okay so this one's going to my test box that's basically my test server and everything this one is going to my Xbox and this one is going to my main computer so as it sits right now this is all going to different things that I was testing out and making sure connected which by the way everything connected was awesome so now I'm gonna hook this up as another port another point on that and use it as just a wireless access point using the Wi-Fi radios built in just as an access point not because I want to deploy that specific router as an access point that I want to use but because I want to test it and get it added and then make sure everything works I don't really think pfSense is gonna have a lot of you know configurations you know past just you know using it or accepting it as a wireless router I don't know yet I haven't dove into it yet but that is my plan and I can say this this has been I don't want to say aggravating but frustrating this has been frustrating because I'm kind of playing around more or less trying to figure stuff out right and I'm looking I'm looking up tutorials and some of the tutorials are wrong are they all saying different things and and what it really boils down to is that there's there's one small change in the version of pfsense can change the way it operates so one tutorial is good for one version and then they they update it and then a bug gets fixed or a feature gets added and it changes the whole dynamics of it so it's like you know you can look up stuff on it but there's no guarantee that that's gonna work for you either way it's fun once I kind of got everything and running and it works great and I don't have any issues so far right now I'm running my main computer slowly through pfSense and it's been you know a good experience so far so where I am now it's great hopefully it won't break on me but it's great still a little aggravating a little frustrating but great whoa Wow focus alright so I got I got a lot of work done today and the thing is is that like I've been working on this for I'm just gonna go all the way down on that one I've been working on this thing for I don't know I lost track of the hours but um but here's where I am as it sits right now like I said before I had all that stuff configured and my next step was to set up a wireless access point and setting up the wireless access point was actually really easy at least it was with Linksys Linksys they have a bunch of different modes that you can select your router as you know bridges and so forth so setting it as a wireless bridge was super simple and then you just plug it into the switch and then boom of course you're gonna have to set your wireless access point like your wireless names which I just said it is like byte since five and bytes it's by sense 2.4 you know but that's basic configuration after that I mean once you've set it as a bridge a wireless bridge and you hook it up to your switch that connects to your pfSense router I mean it just recognizes it and assigns whatever's connected to it with a DHCP address and then you know you're good to go and of course it's gonna set the router itself to its own IP address so if you did ever have to go through and manage your wireless settings then you would just connect to that separately so it's super simple to do so here's where I am right now pretty much I am at a point where since everything is set up I have the wireless access point hooked up I have everything configured and ready to go my next step is to essentially run it as a testing environment for I don't know maybe a week or two before I actually deploy it as a permanent solution and the reason why I want to do that is because I want to make sure that you know I'm not gonna run into any issues on my own computer where I'm running into sites that might be get blocked or I got her tweaked some firewall rules you know just any little knickknacks stuff that you know just comes up that you don't really notice or know what you need to do with until it actually pops up that's what I want to test out and that's what I want to make sure I perfect until I roll this out as a permanent solution and I know that might sound a little weird to a lot of people it's like dude just install it and deploy who cares but you know I want to make sure that you know for right now I have my my DVR set up with the security cameras that I'm running I want to make sure those stay online my plex server is online I want to make sure that you know I still have some virtual machines going that do require an internet connection constantly so I have to make sure that I'm online at least as much as you know humanly possible or technically possible so taking down the network and you know switching it out with a different router is kind of a big task on my end as far as wanting to stay or wanting to keep everything online so before I do anything like that I am gonna test this thing out for a while make sure everything is good and then and only then will I deploy it as a as a daily use thing and really at this point since I have the access point everything set up I have everything configured the only thing I have to do from here is to go in and change the sub IP address the subnet instead of 192.168.20.10 one which was back to my original you know subnet so once I do that I can set up my address reservation and everything will be still configured as it is and then I can deploy it and switch everything over with little to no effort as far as you know configuring other devices because it'll just plug in and everything will connect and it'll be good to go including the wireless because once I configure the wireless using utilizing the C 5400 it should maintain the same wireless you know you SSID and password or it will contain the same s societies and passwords so everything will connect and that's really what I'm aiming for is just you know a seamless transition from PFC or from my main router to PS sense and having no downtime or a little very little downtime and not having to go through and change anything on my network now the big difference here is that I'm going to have a added layer of security and I'm gonna go as far as to say and this is speculating probably more so than what I what I have with the norton core because with the norton core while it does protect you know like it does have a firewall and it does give you some you know virus scanning built into it that's pretty much all you have you know you can't specify entire countries you know blocking entire countries from connecting to your network or you can't specify you know like a certain black list of IPS that are connected to advertisers or malware sites or certain things like that now of course some of that is controlled through the norton core you know servers where they have their blacklisted servers and i'm sure there's a lot of you know similar IP addresses that are shared on those lists but what the PF sense of course is going to be more controlled and you can you know adjust and add and do whatever you want rather than putting everything in the hands of the norton core and I'm not ragging on the norton core i mean that the normal course is actually really easy to just set up forget you know it's there it's working it's doing its thing and you're not spending like 15 hours getting the damn thing working so you know there's definitely something can be said for something as simple as a consumer product like that but if you're willing to put in the time and you're just that nerdy and you want to actually explore what else is out there PF sense is kind of fun to learn a little aggravating a little irritating but definitely fun to learn so guys this video started off with a question mark in my head and I didn't know how I was going to do it I thought maybe I was trying to get everything set up and it would fail and then I would post a video asking for help but I'm in just resilient enough and just stubborn enough to just keep pounding through and Google in every single error message that pops up then I was able to get it up and run you know was able to get it figured out so I guess what this video is just like hey this is the project that I started these are some of the things that I ran into and although I haven't deployed it this will give you a taste of what it's like to setup something that you really know very little about I mean you for me I've barely scratched the surface as far as what pfsense was able to do before this video and even still now I mean I've scratched a little bit deeper but in reality I'm still a noob when it comes to PF sense so I guess if anything this video can just be a window into the Nerds life when he's trying to figure something out that he doesn't quite understand so as always guys thank you for watching I appreciate every single one of you I do want to do a follow-up video you know something where I'm going to deploy this and set everything up and it's gonna be a little bit more official this is more of kind of like a I don't want to say vloggy style but you know it's just a little bit more you know relaxed version of you know my little setup project so hopefully you guys enjoyed it but again I appreciate you guys for watching it either way guys have any questions or anything posted down below if you have any comments on you know maybe things that I did wrong and eager to listen to how stupid I am because I'm pretty sure I probably messed something up somewhere so again thank you for watching like and subscribe below and have a good night

Channel: Byte My Bits

Views: 22,992

Keywords: pfSense, router, Build, problems, headache

Id: PIj1pxpnWEk

Length: 37min 1sec (2221 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 12 2017