I’ve recently replaced an aging Linksys WRT54G running DD-WRT with a PC running pfSense. 

Around a month ago I added a second NIC to an old mini-ITX 1ghz VIA motherboard I had lying around and dropped it in place of DD-WRT.  The PCI NIC started locking up daily about a week ago.  pfSense automatically restarts the interface after a minute or so, so it wasn’t very urgent.

I recently aquired a P4 machine with dual onboard NICs, so last night I swapped it in place of the VIA machine.  Since my internet connection peaks at around 40mbit,  I won’t be seeing any immediate benefit from the gbit nics.  I’ve been prepared with a DOCSIS 3 Motorolla Surfboard for around a year, so I’ve got my fingers crossed I’ll see Charter jump over the 100mbit barrier.  Besides, It’s nice to see more gigabit link lights lit.

Although CPU utilization was never very high with on VIA, the web configuration pages are much faster on the P4.  Now that I have more wiggle room, I will likely add a spinning hdd (or two) and play around with using it as a caching proxy (both forward and reverse), for VPN access, and possibly as my SIP PBX.

I currently run a few local web services on different machines behind some apache name-based reverse proxy vhost configurations   I’m working on moving these roles to pfSense, so I’m going to try to document my steps post an update when I’m done.