What you need: pfSense program; 64bit computer Time required: One hour
You might not think you need another firewall. The one built into Windows is working all the time in the background to protect individual computers, and many routers have their own firewalls to protect your entire network. However, running your own custom firewall has several benefits: it gives you more flexibility, and better oversight of what’s going on in the background. And it’s easier than you might think. You don’t need specialist hardware and you won’t have to pay for firewall software.
The open-source pfSense firewall is free for personal use (though you don’t get the commercial support provided by the paid-for version). You can run it in a virtual machine on any PC on your network or install it on an old PC you no longer use.
1 Free up enough memory
The pfSense firewall installs as a complete operating system based on the operating system FreeBSD, so it has the same system requirements. This means you’ll need to allocate at least 512MB of memory to it, and have a 64bit processor running at more than 500MHz. If you
