I need a new PFSense box, ASAP. It has been bugging me forever that I have a sad Dlink piece of S*H*-*T. I wanted to buy THIS, but it is out of stock. The money is burning a hole in my pocket. I live in Can-ada. Anyone got a link to a similar kit? It has to be a kit. 2.5" drive space a +.
Help me Tek.
K
Do you absolutely have to have a little embedded ultra-low-power crazy tiny little thing with no normal graphics output? Or would a cheap little ITX board with an Atom or a Pentium or something work? You can still put it in a very very tiny case (like smaller than a half-height case) but it will be a tad taller than the embedded thing from PC Engines.
Id suggest something that fits into 1U.. incredible useful =)
APU1D4 Red Combo Kit
This is what I currently run.
Have been for about a year.
Not one issue with it.
I would recommend this.
It's similar to the one on netgate.
@K4KFH Ya i'm thinking a little embedded ultra-low-power crazy tiny little thing. I really don't want another full tower kicking around. It is only for a small home network. Ideally 4-port.
@th3zone 1U?? I was looking at a 1037 celeron but it was pricey and out of stock. CAN$ has just plummeted. You got a link?
I was thinking of upgrading my wife’s laptop ram and putting her old stuff in the new router.
1U is one unit of rack height in a 19" rack.
You probably don't wanna do that. Unless you just happen to find an ITX board that takes SODIMMs, that's more trouble than it's worth. DDR3 is so unbelievably cheap now it doesn't make any sense, and routers don't need an insane amount of RAM anyway.
That board is a low power ITX Intel Atom thing. It also takes SODIMMs, so your wife-laptop-RAM-upgrade plot would work with that board.
Pretty much any little ITX board with an Intel Atom, Intel Celeron, or something comparable will do a basic pfSense box. Mine is a crappy single core VIA ITX board from when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Whatever board you go with, you can get one of these cases:
And one of these PSUs which will give you a 12v plug on the back of the case. You'll need the PSU and the 12v power brick.
You probably don't. If you don't already have a bunch of stuff in a rack, the rackmount stuff gets very pricey very quickly, and it's also very big. It also tends to be loud, which is probably not ideal for a little home router to sit in a corner and be unobtrusive.
High powered stuff yes... but atom or a like that's passively cooled is as silent as it can be. e.g. the HP switches I have are silent. I just wish the ubnt edge router lite would have brackets to be properly mounted.
Btw. for the edge router lite (~99 bucks) there is a pfsense image to flash onto that nifty 3 port box.
You, sir, just made my day. I had been looking for an excuse to try one of those.
Hehe, I have not tried it.. as I'm honestly satisfied with what edgeOS delivers and I do not want risking to jam my door to the world shut in an experiment... but I am tempted to get a 2nd one for trying O.o
Yeah, flashing embedded devices is not my strong suit. I've bricked a router with DD-WRT and managed to end up with a really slow install on the only router I've successfully done it with. I dislike embedded things, I do everything I possibly can with a PC because if it breaks, there's a 99.99999% chance I can just reinstall the OS or replace one piece of hardware.
That is what I love about the raspberry approach.. if you fuck up, take the SD out and flash a new go onto it.
The bad thing about embedded stuff sooo very often is the soldered on storage... if you fuck up the boot loader.. your done unless you pull out the SPI programmer =/
Yeah, I'd really love to see some sort of a "Raspberry Pi" style device for routers/really really small servers. I know there's all these Mini ITX boards like I was just saying but it'd be really cool to see an ARM version of pfSense that could run on an ODROID or something. The problem with the Pi is that it doesn't have the IO to have multiple Ethernet interfaces without one of them being total crap.
The SoC does not have the capabilities =( I mean the Ethernet port of the PI not even has its own USB port... no its shared with the other conventional USB outlets =/
A conventional router board... with a SD card slot would already be great. I assume most of them run arm in one or the other version anyway.
@K4KFH Ok dope, would these work with a GA-H55M-S2H an i3-350??
Recommendation for an ebay intel 2 and 4-port nic? This one?
I hesitate to use the PIco PSU with an i3. I don't know that it wouldn't work, but it seems that those PSUs are more meant for little low power things like Celerons/Atoms. Of course if you used a traditional desktop PSU, or even a compact ITX one like in Logan's "Colugo" editing rig, it should work fine. As far as NICs, I would talk to @DeusQain on that because I am a NIC peasant. I have a 100mbps built in NIC for my WAN interface with a 1Gbps TP-Link NIC for my LAN, and that's usually considered junk compared to the Intels.
Thanks @K4KFH, I'm no wizard with voltage. Originally I thought this might work, but I was unsure. actually I had a tread before but procrastinated. Now I just hold out anymore.
@DeusQain that nic look reeeeeeally good, is it right?