The original plan was innocent enough: build a private media server using Docker so my family’s mountain of DVDs could finally live in the digital world. But me being me, I thought, “Why stop there? Let’s protect the whole network from prying eyes and malicious attackers.” Enter: pfSense.
I spun up pfSense in a VM on the server machine, thinking I could conquer networking overnight. Reality check: while pfSense worked, my network speeds got chopped faster than Ted Allen could utter the words. Gigabit potential? Gone. After about a week of fighting bottlenecks, I decided the VM setup wasn’t it.
So I grabbed another computer, wiped it clean, and flashed OPNsense as the main OS. Why? Because the internet told me it was “better” and “more user-friendly.” Turns out, “better” is subjective, and “user-friendly” still assumes you know what you’re doing, which I didn’t. OPNsense just didn’t work the same for me as pfSense did.
Meanwhile, my networking setup devolved into a mess of daisy-chained cables and basic USB Ethernet adapters, looking more like a game of Twister than a clean homelab. Every day, the project strayed further away from the original media server.
“Is the wifi back up yet?” – My father, one too many times
And the kicker? As it stands right now, nothing is functional. The firewalls, the docker containers, the server – it’s all taking a timeout. My family has survived three weeks of shaky WiFi (shoutout to their patience), and I’ve finally admitted defeat… for now. I reset everything back to the cable modem defaults, just so we could all breathe again.
Lessons Learned (So Far)
- pfSense in a VM taught me a ton, but bottlenecks are real.
- OPNsense might be “friendlier,” but not if you’re already fried from weeks of trial and error.
- It never stops at just one project.
- Sometimes, you’ve just gotta walk away and give your brain a break.
- What day is it?
- Did I eat today?
- Ugh.
I’m a web developer, not a network engineer, but I have this habit of taking on projects I know nothing about, diving deep, breaking everything in sight, and eventually figuring it out. It’s not pretty, and the roadblocks are massive, but that’s how I learn.
For now, I’m shelving this one for a month, letting my brain cool off, and maybe – just maybe – next time I’ll end up with both a working network and a media server. What do I get myself into?
Scripted with 
by Austin Wells