It depends. My cable modem has an external IP only. If you are getting a 192.168.1.0/24 IP from the cable modem, it means the connection is already NATed.

Love the article. Wanted to mention that when i tried to follow your instructions, it went a bit differently.

instead of the iso image installer, i used the USB Memstick. Pfsense themselves say that for VM use image installer, but if for baremetal no VM, use the usb memstick. Also when i did attempt using rufus with the image installer, it didn’t work, but the USB memstick version did.

I used lawrences tips for restoring the config from my pfsense VM from a different device
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QD511ir2dhY

For pfsense install setup i more or less followed the instructions here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThGLEkzKlTU

But i did it a bit differently, as i plugged in a cable from the qotom to my monitor, as well as add a keyboard as well as the usb memstick loaded with pfsense which was made bootable using rufus.

When booting up qotom, it loaded the pfsense installer. But if it doesn’t, you can hit “delete” when the nuc starts up to enter bios, to then select to boot from the memstick. You have to hit “delete” quickly though because it flashes by fast.

If backup config was on a memstick, you could import it to pfsense from the shell. Then change the interfaces to match what is available on the Qotom. in my case it was br0, br1, br2, br3. I setup br0 as wan, and br1 as lan.

i encountered a bug where my dns resolver was not working. i managed to fix it by booting pfsense into individual user mode, then running the “fsck -fy /” command. It is recommended to repeat the command run 5 times, even if it says no problems detected. In my case the first run detected a issue which it fixed. Then type “reboot”. On startup i confirmed that dns resolver and thus pfblocker worked again.

another setting i had to adjust was in pfsense settings to add the QOTOM sensor which is intel cpu sensor. The default none has no reading, so i recommend to edit this.

I also noticed my connection to switch was 100mbit, but i later found out the ethernet cable was bad. replacing it fixed the problem. I get 1gbit speeds now when testing using iperf.

tested on speedtest and i got my full 100mbps dl, 50 mbps ul. with 4ms latency. 40ms latency if i use vpn. Not bad.

I get about 120Mbps DL and 40Mbps UL speeds normally with my cable provider. I’ve never had any network latency, slowness and dropped packets but I have only 3 regular users behind my pfSense. Qotom comes with Realtek NICs and they are not recommended for any production use. For home it’s fine, for anything more serious go with Intel or Broadcom.

Thanks in advance
Art