In a crazy pursuit of the best gateway solution for my home network I have been looking for three dominant features; security, efficiency, and excellent utilization of bandwidth. Pfsense is by far the most effective/easily manageable options I've used, the web interface is unmatched in flexibility. OpenWRT has since offered the best bandwidth throughput of any option I've tested. I now have some better guidelines from which I can work with to achieve maximum potential from both my connection and the hardware I currently have on hand. I went started this project wanting to buy nothing- I have tons of hardware laying around and a breath of fresh life into old hardware offers me some happiness.

For this project I stumbled across an old machine I had stored in my closet, It's a very small machine that has low power consumption and for it's size, [and price :D], considerable hardware specifications..

950Mhz Celeron
512MB RAM
40GB Hard drive
1-Gigabit Network Interface
1-10/100 Network Interface
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1- CD-ROM
1- Floppy

This machine is going to be running FreeBSD 8. I first performed rigorous hardware diagnostic and testing tools, making sure that the MLB, RAM, and hard drive were all in great order. Everything passed after one evening of multi-faceted testing, so I then used Spinrite to refresh the surfaces and check for any bad places on the drive. Successful, I then moved onto installing a fresh copy of FreeBSD 8, here:

8.0-RELEASE-i386-disc1.iso (1)

I installed it using the standard installation procedure, enabling all sources, and I'm ready to go. Now I have a fresh install and I'm ready to begin, let's dig in!

Phase I. 

    Customze make.conf

One of my primary goals for this is efficiently, outstanding performance for little hardware requirements. One of the biggest things we can do to increase that is optimize make.conf for better binaries resulting in more efficient hardware usage. We will specify the processor type so that when apps are compiled they will take advantage of all the processor features. We can add lines that strip out certain types of builds.

Ex,This machine is headless and therefore we can prevent any unnecessary packages, settings, etc. required for X11, graphical interfaces, etc.