My first experiences were in late 2003 and the beginning of 2004.
I received from my father an old PC – really old one – from the early 1990’s.
It had a 486 processor of AMD, and a tiny hard disk of 325Mb.
I thought it will be cool to have it as a home-made firewall.
In the end – I did have a working FreeBSD, but didn’t build any firewall.
I had no power to go into all th security staff , and mainly – I had troubles setting the ADSL connection from it.
I found my messages at “Whatsup” that describe it.
and about OpenBSD: