Dallas Buyers Club Preview [WORKING × How-To]
The story of Dallas Buyers Club is one of defiance, desperation, and an unlikely transformation. Set in 1985, it follows Ron Woodroof, a hard-living Texas electrician and rodeo enthusiast whose world shatters when he is diagnosed with HIV and given only 30 days to live. The Desperate Search
As the club grows, Woodroof finds himself in a high-stakes legal and ethical battle against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the medical establishment. He transforms from a self-serving smuggler into a fierce advocate for patients' rights, fighting for the right to try experimental treatments. A Legacy of Survival dallas buyers club preview
What starts as a personal survival mission evolves into a business. Woodroof teams up with Rayon, a transgender woman also living with HIV. Together, they establish a "Buyers Club," where members pay a fee for access to the alternative treatments Woodroof procures. Despite their initial friction, the two form a deep, protective bond as they navigate the stigma of the era. Defying the System The story of Dallas Buyers Club is one
Ultimately, Woodroof lived for seven years following his diagnosis—far outlasting the 30 days doctors originally predicted. The story serves as a powerful testament to the human spirit's ability to innovate and resist in the face of systemic indifference. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the medical
Finding himself at the center of the early AIDS crisis, Woodroof refuses to accept his death sentence. When the only legal drug, AZT, proves toxic and difficult to obtain, he begins smuggling unapproved antiviral treatments and supplements from Mexico. An Unlikely Partnership
This article is a work in progress and will continue to receive ongoing updates and improvements. It’s essentially a collection of notes being assembled. I hope it’s useful to those interested in getting the most out of pfSense.
pfSense has been pure joy learning and configuring for the for past 2 months. It’s protecting all my Linux stuff, and FreeBSD is a close neighbor to Linux.
I plan on comparing OPNsense next. Stay tuned!
Update: June 13th 2025
Diagnostics > Packet Capture
I kept running into a problem where the NordVPN app on my phone refused to connect whenever I was on VLAN 1, the main Wi-Fi SSID/network. Auto-connect spun forever, and a manual tap on Connect did the same.
Rather than guess which rule was guilty or missing, I turned to Diagnostics > Packet Capture in pfSense.
1 — Set up a focused capture
Set the following:
192.168.1.105(my iPhone’s IP address)2 — Stop after 5-10 seconds
That short window is enough to grab the initial handshake. Hit Stop and view or download the capture.
3 — Spot the blocked flow
Opening the file in Wireshark or in this case just scrolling through the plain-text dump showed repeats like:
UDP 51820 is NordLynx/WireGuard’s default port. Every packet was leaving, none were returning. A clear sign the firewall was dropping them.
4 — Create an allow rule
On VLAN 1 I added one outbound pass rule:
The moment the rule went live, NordVPN connected instantly.
Packet Capture is often treated as a heavy-weight troubleshooting tool, but it’s perfect for quick wins like this: isolate one device, capture a short burst, and let the traffic itself tell you which port or host is being blocked.
Update: June 15th 2025
Keeping Suricata lean on a lightly-used secondary WAN
When you bind Suricata to a WAN that only has one or two forwarded ports, loading the full rule corpus is overkill. All unsolicited traffic is already dropped by pfSense’s default WAN policy (and pfBlockerNG also does a sweep at the IP layer), so Suricata’s job is simply to watch the flows you intentionally allow.
That means you enable only the categories that can realistically match those ports, and nothing else.
Here’s what that looks like on my backup interface (
WAN2):The ticked boxes in the screenshot boil down to two small groups:
app-layer-events,decoder-events,http-events,http2-events, andstream-events. These Suricata needs to parse HTTP/S traffic cleanly.emerging-botcc.portgrouped,emerging-botcc,emerging-current_events,emerging-exploit,emerging-exploit_kit,emerging-info,emerging-ja3,emerging-malware,emerging-misc,emerging-threatview_CS_c2,emerging-web_server, andemerging-web_specific_apps.Everything else—mail, VoIP, SCADA, games, shell-code heuristics, and the heavier protocol families, stays unchecked.
The result is a ruleset that compiles in seconds, uses a fraction of the RAM, and only fires when something interesting reaches the ports I’ve purposefully exposed (but restricted by alias list of IPs).
That’s this keeps the fail-over WAN monitoring useful without drowning in alerts or wasting CPU by overlapping with pfSense default blocks.
Update: June 18th 2025
I added a new pfSense package called Status Traffic Totals:
Update: October 7th 2025
Upgraded to pfSense 2.8.1:
Fantastic article @hydn !
Over the years, the RFC 1918 (private addressing) egress configuration had me confused. I think part of the problem is that my ISP likes to send me a modem one year and a combo modem/router the next year…making this setting interesting.
I see that Netgate has finally published a good explanation and guidance for RFC 1918 egress filtering:
I did not notice that addition, thanks for sharing!