Pfsense

When I started my Homelab in 2020 I didn’t have a proper router, however, I was able to overcome this shortfall at the time by port forwarding essential services from my Unraid instance. I purchased a PFSense Firewall from Netgate in early January 2021 to solve this issue. With the purchase of the new Firewall, I decided to purchase my domain, ajsprague.com.

The first focus with the new Firewall and the domain name was to solve a problem I had with my VPN. The problem was that my public IP address is dynamic, so over time the VPN peer connections would direct to the wrong network because the address changes. The first step was to move my VPN operations from Unraid to PFSense. Then I used my domain name to create a dynamic endpoint for my VPN peer connection, solving the problem. 

After implementing PFsense it made more sense to test out new docker applications. Once I started expanding the number of applications running on my Unraid instance I began using the reverse proxy functionality within PFsense. I installed HaProxy, which also has the ability to act as a load balancer. In conjunction with ACME certificates, HaProxy handles both HTTP and HTTPS traffic on my domain.