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The best practices for installation and configuration

Once you have chosen your hardware and which version you are going to install, you can download pfSense.

Browse to the Downloads section of pfsense.org and select the appropriate computer architecture (32-bit, 64-bit, or Netgate ADI), the appropriate platform (Live CD, memstick, or embedded), and you should be presented with a list of mirrors. Choose the closest one for the best performance.

You will also want to download the SHA256 checksum file in order to verify the integrity of the downloaded image. Verifying the integrity of downloads serves two purposes:

It ensures that the download completed
It safeguards against a party maliciously tampering with the images

In order to safeguard ...

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