Oliver Hansen

I need to give credit to this post in the pfSense forums which showed that this was possible. This box is pretty nice in that the processor is a Celeron 2.0GHz and it has 6 onboard Intel 10/100 NICs which are preferred by far over the usual Realtek NICs found in embedded devices. It was just by chance that I saw the post the other day even though it had been posted a while back. My company had two of these donated a while back but we weren’t using them because we had no real need to muck with the licensing when the hardware was discontinued. Have a look at what you can find these Symantec 5420 Security Gateway for these days. The author of the post gave a few tips but no real instructions so after I got it working I thought I would put together a step-by-step guide.

First, what you will need:

• A knowledge of how to install pfSense – This guide assumes you have installed pfSense before. If you have not, look at the detailed instructions on the pfSense wiki.
• 1 Symantec 5420 Security Gateway – these can be found secondhand since they are discontinued
• 1 IDE HDD (Hard Drive)
• 1 computer that can boot from CD – you will not need this after the install is finished
• 1 computer with a serial port and a serial cable – this can be the same computer that you boot with but must have an OS

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