After getting tired of relying on my ISP’s black box gateway, I decided to take control of my home network security with pfSense. This post walks through the first stage of my project—from installing pfSense on an old enterprise server, to configuring DHCP, DNS forwarding, and building out simple but meaningful firewall rules. I’ll also share lessons learned, gotchas, and some small wins that reminded me why I started this in the first place. Whether you’re new to home lab firewalls or knee-deep in VLAN configs, there’s something here for you