Do you remember me ranting a while back about how I’d built an OpenBSD firewall but it was a total pain and someone should make an “appliance” for it?

The pfSense people beat me to it, a long time ago. It’s a FreeBSD “distro” meant to convert a PC into an advanced router. It seems like it’ll support everything, ranging from NATing two PCs out your cable modem, to load-balancing a corporate network, incoming and outgoing. It supports a captive portal too, as well as VPNs, more firewall options than you could ever want and, of course, lots of nice graphs.

Absurd idea of the day: (1) get ISP at home, (2) find open wireless connection and use traceroute to verify that they’re on a different ISP, (3) set up load-balancing with some rules to route ‘sensitive’ traffic over your own connection.

This, by the way, is another project that would rock with Walmart’s $200 low-power PC. (Now if only it came in a spiffy rackmount case…) It’d also be well-suited for a DNS cache and a home DHCP server; you could even set it up as a transparent squid proxy if you wanted. (Though none of those features are listed on pfSense, so you might have to drop into the shell to set them up.) Oh, and it’s got a serial port, so why not buy a GPS and make it a stratum 1 NTP server?