I’ve got a small, multiple-ethernet port computer arriving from Amazon today (a QOTOM Core i5).

I’ve been running SOHO boundary routers for the last many years and finding that they’re somewhat inflexible, eventually stop being updated and often frustrating in the features that they omit.

I’ve had a new boundary router sitting on the shelf for about a year that I still can’t get my ISP connection to provide an address to. It works fine as an upstream off of my internal network though. There isn’t enough diagnostic information readily available to figure out what is happening and shutting my external connection down for extended experiment breaks isn’t really a happy thing either.

I’m expecting to install pfSense on the machine when I get it. I’ll have to come up to speed on the configuration for pfSense, but I expect that once I’ve got it in place, the project will continue providing updates over a much longer span than other options. I’m also hoping that inbound VPN capability can be set up without extra cost client packages and other entanglements…

I’ll update once I’ve got the hardware in hand and have started in on the setup process.