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by organsnyder 4163 days ago
Great news. I've been running pfSense at home and work for the past few years, and it's been great. Very stable, easy to configure, and quick with security fixes.

A pfSense box with a Ubiquiti UniFi access point is a really good combo. Far more stable than a typical consumer router, and not necessarily much more expensive.

2 comments

I run this exact same setup (pfSense-based Mini-ITX router and several UAP-ACs), and it works outstanding. I had used DD-WRT for several years, but having hack pile up on top of hack to keep things running on DD-WRT. When we moved to a larger house, we could no longer adequately cover the house from a single router/access point combo, so I took the leap and built a pfSense machine. Absolutely don't regret it. After getting it set up, it just works with minimal intervention.

With a little work, you can get the Ubiquiti controller software running on the actual pfSense machine itself. http://community.ubnt.com/t5/UniFi-Wireless/Tutorial-UniFi-3...

I tried running the Ubiquiti controller software on the pfSense box for a while, but it was a pain - it took 5-10 minutes to start up, and it was lost whenever I did a pfSense upgrade. I've found it much easier to just point the access points at a general-purpose server (on-site if available, or on a remote VPS that I have already).
The startup time was a weird combination of unifi/java/freebsd. I haven't seen it in some time.
Weird. Other than the startup thing (which is not a big deal for me because I leave it running), I haven't had any problems upgrading. A few months ago I went to 2.1.5 and pretty much everything just worked.
Minor upgrades were fine. It was a major one (2.0 to 2.1) that wiped it out for me. This was on the embedded version of pfSense - the full version might behave differently.

Otherwise, the upgrade was one of the smoothest I've ever had for this sort of thing.

I have the exact same setup. Works great.