This book is targeted at intermediate users; therefore, prior mastery of basic networking concepts is a prerequisite. Prior experience with pfSense is a plus, although not strictly necessary. If you need a beginner-level book to help familiarize yourself with pfSense, you might consider pfSens e 2 Cookbook by Matt Williamson, which provides many useful configuration examples.

If you have never used pfSense before or do not feel comfortable deploying it on your network without testing it first, you might want to run pfSense in a virtual machine. Many of the examples provided in this book were tested in such a manner. I used Oracle VirtualBox, but feel free to use whichever virtualization software you prefer. Virtualization can be resource intensive; I recommend at least a quad-core processor with 8 GB of RAM.

The pfSense project website (http://pfsense.org) lists the following minimum requirements for pfSense:

Running pfSense does not require much in terms of resources; virtually any computer manufactured since the early 2000s meets these requirements. Therefore, an old computer is a good candidate for being repurposed as a pfSense system. You may want to run pfSense on a thin client or embedded system as those tend to consume less power, and there are many options if you choose to do so.