Why do I need a new router - An Introduction to PFsense, the Gateway Drug of Selfhosting

PFsense is a gateway drug Link to heading

After getting a cursory interest in selfhosting, I kept seeing the same thing pop up: “That would be great for PFsense.” So I went and looked up PFsense and saw that it was… a router. Boring. At the time, I was one of the naysayers, because I already had my perfectly good Netgear Nighthawk router. There’s no reason to use PFsense. Until there is. And the spark that set off my selfhosting journey was when I starting learning about network segmentation (separate your IoT devices from everything else), only to realize that my Netgear Nighthawk was severely limited (read: non-existent) in its Virtual LAN (VLAN) and subnetting capabilities. Up to this point, I had one network, why would I ever need another one? But diving a bit deeper into security made me understand how critical the router and firewall truly were to setting up a secure home network. At this point, PFsense started to make sense to me. But how do I get it? The answer to this question was another critical junction point in my hobby: buying and repurposing used enterprise hardware. In this case, the HP T620+ thin client came highly recommended for PFsense due to its small form factor and inclusion of a PCIE slot which just so happened to fit a quad-port network interface card (NIC). I made an Ebay account, began searching, and found exactly what I was looking for. A few days later I had the device at my door and began to set it up.