This is my personal guide for installing pfSense. Hope you find it useful. I made these notes to capture the details of my "install from scratch" to ensure I didn't miss important details. Also, I'm trying build my network with discrete "disposable" components that make the system mutable and less rigid. It does not cover installing any packages like Squid or Suricata as that's way beyond the scope of a basic, functional install.
I migrated from an environment that was at various times running Tomato Toastman 1.28 or Asuswrt-Merlin on Netgear and ASUS routers across four "access points" (one always acting as the firewall/gateway, the rest as APs). It was OK pre-gigabit, but had roaming problems, and I was using large Wifi routers with most of the features disabled. Also, I found that I could easily swamp the network and tank VOIP and Wifi Calling without even trying. The only fix was to throttle everything by using Bandwidth Limit
