Create Your Own Router and Firewall Solution

Preparing the Installation

It doesn’t take a lot of preparation besides setting up your hardware, and we’ve already done that. Now we need to download pfSense, and we head over to the official download site for that. At the time of writing, it looks like this, but that might change slightly through time. The basics stay the same though.

We are creating a fresh install, so the first thing to select is Install as the file type. The other option is to get an upgrade version for those who already run a prior version of pfSense. As for the architecture, you’ll want to select the AMD64 over i386. Don’t get confused by the AMD and i for Intel, that’s just who came up with the standards. AMD64 is the 64-bit version, and it works the same on Intel and AMD system. The i386 version is the 32-bit version for older hardware.

The platform allows us to select between USB Memstick Installer, CD ISO image, and Embedded BSD. We’ll pick the USB Memstick Installer here. The ISO file is for optical media installation while the Embedded version is for those who want to run it from a memory card. Select VGA as console and the download mirror closest to you before hitting the Download button.

Once you have downloaded the file, we need to get it onto a flash drive. Luckily, there are tools for that. I often recommend Unetbootin for such situations, but not today. Unetbootin’s method of writing the image to the drive will end in installation mount failures. If you’re knowledgeable in Linux and BSD systems, you can quickly fix that manually.

Instead, you should get Rufus. The Rufus tool is very similar to Unetbootin in many ways, but it comes with more options, and it’s easier to use. It is free to download and doesn’t take up a lot of drive space either. If you download the portable version, you don’t even need to install it.

Select your flash drive at the top of the tool and change the ‘Create a bootable disk using’ from FreeDOS to DD Image. Choose the pfsense file that you just downloaded with the icon next to and hit the Start button. Wait for it to finish and you’re set.

We have set up and installed our various hardware and flashed a medium to install from; now it’s time to install pfSense and get going with our new and fantastic DIY firewall or router solution.