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pfSense

Purpose

A dedicated firewall is essential for any secure environment. Since I don’t yet run a separate physical box, I deployed pfSense as a VM on Proxmox. It might not be the “perfect” option, but it gave me a starting point—and more importantly, a lot of lessons in networking, virtualization, and operational resilience.

Lessons Learned

  • Networking fundamentals: Clear separation of WAN vs. LAN, NAT in practice, and the difference between stateful and stateless firewalls.
  • Firewall rules: How small misconfigurations can break all connectivity, and how careful planning is required to avoid accidental lockouts.
  • Troubleshooting: Handling numerous connectivity issues while learning the pfSense interface.
  • Proxmox passthroughs: Experimenting with PCI passthrough for network cards, including painful lockouts that taught the importance of backup access methods.
  • Operational insight: Understanding why enterprises often keep “temporary” insecure access paths—because they’re left behind during setup and never removed.

Setup

  • Running pfSense as a FreeBSD VM inside Proxmox.
  • Access redundancy: Proxmox web UI console serves as a fallback when network access fails.
  • Snapshots provide basic resilience, though no dedicated backup system is yet in place.

Value

Right now, pfSense provides a baseline of security and—just as importantly—valuable logs to analyze. The real power will come once VLANs are implemented and logs are aggregated into a centralized system for deeper analysis. For me, pfSense is both a protective layer and a training tool.

Next Steps

  • Implement centralized logging and visualization (Grafana or similar).
  • Build towards a full intrusion detection setup.
  • Eventually replace the VM with a dedicated hardware firewall for improved reliability and performance.

Resilience

Snapshots allow quick rollbacks, but long-term, I need to establish a proper backup and recovery strategy. pfSense is training wheels for my network security—but strong enough to carry me forward.