You might be wondering if using an old laptop as a pfSense router is a good idea. In many respects, laptops are good candidates for being repurposed into routers. They are small, energy efficient, and when the AC power shuts off, they run on battery power, so they have a built-in uninterruptable power supply (UPS). Moreover, many old laptops can be purchased relatively cheaply at thrift shops and online.

There is, however, one critical limitation to using a laptop as a router: in almost all cases, they only have one Ethernet port. Moreover, there is often no realistic way to add another NIC, as there are no expansion slots that will take another NIC (some, however, do have PCMCIA slots that will take a second NIC). There are gigabit USB-to-Ethernet adapters (for USB 3.0), but this is not much of a solution. Such adapters do not have the reliability of traditional NICs. Most laptops do not have Intel NICs either; high-end business laptops are usually the exception to this rule.

There is a way to use a laptop with a single Ethernet port as a pfSense router, and that is to configure pfSense using VLANs. As mentioned earlier, VLANs, or virtual LANs, allow us to use a single NIC to serve multiple subnets. Thus, we can set up two VLANs on our single port: virtual LAN #1, which we will use for the WAN interface, and virtual LAN #2, which we will use for the LAN interface. The one disadvantage of this setup is that you must use a managed switch to make this work. Managed switches are switches that can usually be configured and managed as groups, they often have both a command-line and web interface for management, and they often have a wide range of capabilities, such as VLANs. Since unmanaged switches forward traffic to all other ports, they are unsuitable for this setup. You can, however, connect an unmanaged switch to the managed switch to add ports. Keep in mind that managed switches are expensive (more expensive than dual and quad port network cards), and if there are multiple VLANs on a single link, this link can easily become overloaded. In scenarios where you can add a network card, this is usually the better option. If you have an existing laptop, however, a managed switch with VLANs is a workable solution.