pfSense Posts

In the year 2021 there are a lot of things that you just take for granted. Remember when you used to have to use jumpers to set things on your computer? Or worrying about IRQ conflicts? Or whether you could get the the drivers you needed to work? These are all parts of the “bad old days” of computers that I don’t miss very much. These days if I plug things into my computer - any of them - I expect them to “just work.” And very often, surprisingly, this is the case. Especially common, well supported things like network cards. So it is notable when I encounter something where that isn’t the case. But first, let’s back up a little bit.

Well, here we are five months later and COVID-19 is still a thing. And like many parents we are facing the need to continue our daughter’s education at home. Our local school district has stated that all learning will be conducted online for at least the first nine weeks. And even if they allow for students to return, we will probably opt to keep her at home for awhile longer until things are more stable. Now, our daughter is seven and will be turning eight in a couple months. So she’s at that age where she’s old enough to do some things independently. But, as most of us know, the Internet is not a safe place for a seven year old and we as parents need to exercise some level of control over the things they can access. And while the best solution is a set of eyes, we obviously can’t be everywhere at all times. So this is the solution I came up with.

Extending my post from last year, here’s some additional data I’m grabbing from pfSense and stuffing into collectd via a script. I’m now grabbing: DHCP Leases CPU Temperature Thermal Zone Temperature SSD Drive Temperature UPS information (via NUT) Here’s the exec script:

So I’ve recently been on a graphing thing, wanting to collect all kind of data from my home network. And collectd seems to be a good candidate for doing that. With a huge number of plugins, it can collect and send just about anything you can think of to a time series database (I’m using InfluxDB for this). But, there’s a significant hole in my data collection: my pfSense firewall. Well, not anymore!

Apple has launched a new Photos App for OS X, along with the ability to upload your entire library to iCloud. And with prices that are so cheap, there’s almost no reason not to. $3.99 a month is cheap insurance to know that every photo I’ve ever taken of my family won’t be wiped out in a tornado. But with this comes a problem - namely, how do you upload a 150 gigabytes of photos over a 5 megabit network connection? Well, you wait a really long time for it to upload. Which is fine, really, because I’m not in any particular hurry to finish. But, once I started the upload, I noticed that surfing the web became pretty much impossible because the upload to iCloud was saturating my upstream bandwidth.

Stop! Do Not Do This! I am leaving this here for the reference and posterity, but for a variety of reasons, I no longer recommend doing this. It is a neat hack, but tends to be a bit of a pain to live with as you end up having to troubleshoot or reinstall it every time you update pfSense or Unifi. When you can install it on a Raspberry Pi for less than $50, there's really no need to do this.I personally have switched to running this on a stock Ubuntu system that runs a few other network services in my house. This is a short tutorial on how to install the Ubiquiti Networks’ UniFi Enterprise Wifi controller software on pfSense 2.2. These directions are derived from these directions for 2.1-RC, but have been updated to work on 2.2. Note that this is a somewhat advanced tutorial. If you are not comfortable working in a Unix command line or editing system files, this is probably not the best thing you could do. But I’m putting it out here in case it will help others.

So after several years of successfully using DD-WRT, I finally decided to move to pfSense. There are a multitude of reasons for this move, but I’ll try to enumerate some of them.