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Comment by jclay | Hacker News Reader

I recently set up Pfsense on an old box I had lying around. The practical uses i’ve found are: setting up the PfsenseNG DNS adblocker and setting up an OpenVPN server so I can VPN into my LAN away from home instead of port forwarding. I also just set up Dynamic DNS so that I can do this with a domain.

Can anyone share other use cases they’ve found to be practical with their homelab setup?

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To expand on the VPN benefits you already have in place... grab a vnc app for Android and VPN in then vnc to a machine from your phone. All of the sudden you are sitting at an Linux desktop on your phone. With DLNA casting you can literally now use your phone as a full blown computer casting to a monitor (assuming you have some sort of peripherals). That was always my holy grail.

- Fine-grained QoS controls via PfSense

- Guest Wi-Fi VLAN with UniFi + PfSense

- NAS with automatic backups of client machines via Syncthing

- Automatic file history of backups with ZFS Snapshots via FreeNAS

- Automatic mirroring of backups to the cloud with Duplicati + Sia

- Home media server via Plex

- Home automation / web dashboard via Home Assistant

- Minecraft server with MineOS in a VM

Those are all things I either have working, or am currently working on setting up on my own network.

Can you expand on the QoS setup you’re using? I’ve recently read about the fq_codel addition to Pfsense and wondering if anyone here has been using that.

I’m also looking for more performance related tunes as well. To that end, I’ve configured Cloudflares DNS but not sure what else yields results. It sounds like squid caching is mostly useless due to most traffic being HTTPS.

It's actually a pretty simple queue-based setup right now. My primary intent was to ensure that bulk downloads and uploads don't interfere with my latency while gaming.

I did look into fq_codel but I don't believe that was a practical option on PfSense back when I was setting everything up. I might have to revisit that now that it has native support in PfSense 2.4.4.

fq_codel is working pretty well for me to keep my ping consistent with big downloads going. There are some straightforward tutorials out there now too, since pfSense has native support.

I have a virtual FreeBSD box running dnscrypt-proxy. It's configured with CloudFlare for DNS over HTTPS.

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