Squid VS pfSense

> But I’m working on setting up a VPN at my house to tunnel all Netflix traffic through ...

On a technical point, you might be able to get away with just using Squid for the proxy, with pretty much default settings.

http://www.squid-cache.org

I used to use that years ago (not with Netflix though) running from a data centre, using an ssh (autossh) tunnel to reach it securely.

Worked pretty well, aside from the extra latency due to the packets having to go an extra half way around the world. ;)

I recommend trying a transparent proxy like Squid. There are many analytics tools for Squid logs. Squid can generate TLS certificates on the fly to inspect secure websites but you'll have to generate and install a CA certificate and key into Squid. You'll also have to import the CA certificate on any machine accessing the internet through the Squid proxy. Squid has the added bonus of caching content to speed up web browsing and reduce data usage.

I “invented” IPFS when I though “wouldn’t it be nice if we could combine Squid-Cache with BackupPC

A couple of dedicated server-side resource caching solutions have emerged over the years: Memcached, Varnish, Squid, etc. Other solutions are less focused on web resource caching and more generic, e.g., Redis or Hazelcast.

Web caching (more techical, probably not useful) there squid-cache

Also, the fact it is distributed by HTTP allow companies (and ISPs) to cache content in Squid servers (http://www.squid-cache.org/). And this is quite a feature!

If your router is compatible with custom firmware (Tomato or DD-WRT) you can flash it and use the logging features of those platforms. Otherwise no there isn't really an "app or software" that can do this, you need a piece of hardware that sits between the LAN devices and the internet connection. That can be a full-fledged computer, if you're willing to use it as firewall or router (pfSense), DNS server (PowerDNS) or proxy server (Squid).

One option is Firewalla Gold Plus, or you could buy a mini PC like it and run pfSense/OPNsense yourself.

Download and install pfsense as a virtual machine or partition: https://www.pfsense.org Configure it with the rules you want: https://youtu.be/VAGFGppSt74 Play with it, but be careful because it will block all traffic unless you check everything properly.

Another option is Firewalla, or buy a mini PC like it and run pfSense/OPNsense yourself. Two similar concepts, with the cost being either money or your DIY time. A lot of Firewalla users say that it's much easier for home use than pfSense/OPNsense, so you might find it worthwhile to spend a little more on it upfront and have to tinker less.

If you want firewall, I think you can use https://www.pfsense.org/ or https://opnsense.org/ , maybe running on an old PC or a Raspberry Pi. Not sure.

I've recently started using OPNsense. It's similar to pfSense, but seems to be considered a little more user-friendly.

For most router issues, I recommend people always put them in to dumb bridge mode and put a proper firewall like pfsense or opnsense as your gateway.

I have found that my historical average packet loss is about 0.02%. Something distinctly changed around 4/20 of this year, and now the average packet loss has gone up to 0.05% with spikes even higher, associated with periods of elevated ping times. It rarely did that before. Typically the IPv6 stack has more problems than v4 (especially an incident of packet loss on 4/28), and neither has been trouble-free since I started service in early 2020. My data comes from a pfSense installation.

I have done this using the Pfsense