How to best do appliance setup?

Networking Networking Hardware
1

So I’m looking at setting up 3 major utilities for my network.

  • pfsense
  • Pi-Hole
  • FreeNAS

But I want to use my machines that I have available the best that I can for the processing power I have available. And, since I want to generally never ever fuck with these machines, or machine, once they are in place, in my opinion, the more powerful box and less machines total used the better.

Right new I am planning to run PFSense on my Mac Pro 1,1. I wonder if it would be possible to run pi hole alongside it on the same machine? What about freenas? Could I run them in VM’s and still route traffic on the 2 built in NIC’s?

ATM I don’t have any PCIe NIC’s on hand, so I am relying on the 2 built in. I have checked, its 2 separate NIC’s.

So what do you think? Could I run all of these systems on one box? If so, how?

Specs of the mac pro just in case someone needs to know

CPU: 2X Intel Xeon 5150 @2.66GHz (2C2T)
RAM: 16GB 800MHZ FBDIMM DDR2 (I think with ECC?)
2 X Intel gigabit NIC’s (can’t find name, ET something)
16GB boot SSD and maybe a hard drive for caching sites

Edit: Oh, also, what happens to be the worst spec to run pi hole on? Could I use something like a pentium 4 if I had one loose?

2

I’m confused by FreeNAS and lack of hard drives.

You could also just install Linux (maybe Alpine, maybe Debian), install samba for file sharing and pihole and enable routing.

I have piHole running in a container on a raspberry pi3 alongside a bunch of other stuff as part of my Hass.io setup. It takes approx no resources at all. Same if you want to run openwrt instead of pfSense on x86, 64M of ram is probably enough.

3

Nah there’ll be drives I just hawen’t figured out what one yet. Atm the machine is only ready for pfsense.

Aight good to know