I went with Snort because I had some familiarity with it from running Security Onion. As an alternative to Snort, you can also run Suricata on pfSense. This is an Intrusion Detection System/Intrusion Prevention System (IDS/IPS) that uses sophisticated and regularly updated rules to detect and prevent attempts by hackers to penetrate your network. I decided to get serious about improving my home network security and I use the following pfSense features to do so: It is increasingly important as more sensitive information in our lives goes digital and we increase our interactivity with technology. If you have read a few of my other articles, you know that I believe security is of paramount importance for your home network. buying off the shelf, Sophos, DD-WRT, and others) for the following 6 reasons. I chose to go with pfSense over other router options (e.g. It also allowed me to step my game up around many other features.

Logging in a standard syslog format for easy log centralization using graylog.

I was intrigued by all the support and positive information about pfSense and as I researched I found it clicked all the boxes of standard features I was using with DD-WRT: Initially, I considered buying a new router that was DD-WRT compatible, but I started to look at custom build options too. I ran DD-wrt on my routers for a while. Eventually, my old Netgear WNDR4000 started to show its age, and I decided it was time for a new router.

The ability to take a regular router and add support for static leases, improved firewall features, better traffic analysis and many other features were too much to pass up. As I started to get more sophisticated I was drawn to DD-WRT.

Like many, I started off buying a router because I wanted multiple devices on my network to have access to the Internet. I purchased routers primarily based on cost.

Pfsense wifi access point