PfSense Box questions

So, I just looked up the benchmarks from the Celeron J1900 and the AMD 5350, and at half the power draw of the AMD The celeron has near identical performance, like the exact same cinebench score. That makes the new list go like this:

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/7qgchM

https://www.streakwave.com/Itemdesc.asp?ic=UAP-AC-LR&eq=&Tp=

I also got a text from my uncle who always has some spare parts on hand, and he may or may not have an AMD Athlon X2 full system minus ram that he can give to me. If he has that, I'll be using that for my tower. But right now the plan is the Celeron as he really doesn't know if he still has it around, or if it was gotten rid of. Fingers crossed for savings xD

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Looks good

I've got a couple of TP-Link switches including that one. It does exactly what it is supposed to and is built well.

I'd shop around for the ethernet cable. You may be able to get something cheap at Monoprice, although you may need to pay for shipping which could end up costing you more than it would at Amazon, might be worth looking into though.

I may actually buy one of those Celeron boards for a PFSense box. Newegg has one for $140 with dual lan ports. I'll have to look at Gigabyte's site to see if I can find out what controls the ports though. It also only has a PCI slot, not PCI so adding WiFi might not be easy unless there are USB options that will go full speed, which I doubt.

Yeah right now I'm planning on this:

I've got a bunch of shorter cat 5e lying around to use for connection things in close proximity, but my desktop will be a little ways away from the switch so this is what I'll be connecting it with.

I'll probably be buying that celeron board tmo unless my uncle has a system. Although considering the power draw of the celeron and the benefits of barely any heat being put off by the unit, its looking like I'll be buying it. I'm really liking the idea of having something with almost no noise or heat generated. My main rig is a Xeon 1231-v3 and a 980 ti, and its setup to be near dead silent unless the gpu is really getting hit hard. But the heat put off can be somewhat annoying in this room with its bad airflow, so I'm weary of adding another system that would be getting minor load 24/7. Heat is a bear to deal with when the room has bad ventilation....

what a shock finding you here. do you work for Pfsense? haha

Maybe I should send them a bill ;)

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instead of buying a j1900 and extra nic... I'll just throw a bat in a hen house.

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Dual-core-mini-pc-Qotom-M150S-2G-ram-8G-SSD-celeron-N3150-Braswell-dual-core-Dual/32533590130.html?ws_ab_test=searchweb201556_1,searchweb201644_3_79_78_77_82_80_62_81,searchweb201560_1

Do not expect the wifi to work in pfsense but it's a passively cooled pc which should do more than enough for your needs and yes get a Ubiquiti AP.

I've been playing with pfSense and Sophos UTM on various pieces of kit this holiday. From single core Pentrium 4, Xenon Core 2 Duo and as an ESXi VM on my older i5 for a couple of days (also running XPEnology + I/O passthrough HBA). I don't think I got anywhere near putting a large load on any of the PCs I was using.

Anyway I finally decided that for 24/7 and low power I would probably buy a Zotac CI323 quad core and run a couple of VMs or the CI321 dual core to run PFSense/Sophos as bare metal. The wireless support support sucks on most of the Unix/Linux distributions so consider re-purposing an old router as a dedicated wireless AP box.

As I don't have many devices on my network and I have a simple network infrastructure I much prefer Sophos UTM for it's straight forward install and GUI. Also I've been running Sophos as a Hyper-V VM on my main PC today as I have dual gigabit on it and you would't know it was running unless I told you so that's another possibility even if you just wanted to have a play before committing on hardware/software.

Its an interesting little box that. But I actually managed to get the price down on the PfSense box itself, so right now I'm sitting at $187 for everything I need except the ubiquiti access point. If I were to go with that little pc I'd still need the switch, ethernet cables, one tiny usb, and one internal usb header to usb A female port. That would make the total come out to about $230 for everything I'd need besides the ubiquiti, and I'm really leaning towards keeping the price down.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Sooo Final Desicions on hardware are made and all parts are ordered, even got some parts in today!

My uncle did have an AMD E1 system that he could give me, but the E1 cpu was just painfully slow and I wanted to be able to run VPNs and all sorts of things like on-router anti-virus. So, I've opted for the AsRock Q1900-ITX, which is an Itx board with the integrated Quad Core Celeron. My uncle did let me have the E1 system, and I will be using the case and power supply from it to conduct router business. I picked up a single 2gb stick of sodimm memory from Patriot to use for the router, a small flash drive, and an internal usb header to usb female A port. I also got an intel gigabit NiC to use as my port out of the router.

The NiC will come out to a switch, which will be connected to a Ubiquiti AC Lite access point (the long range version was out of stock), and just one desktop to start with. The original plan was to have it connected too a pair of desktops by wire, but the router will be moving rooms and it is going to be a later project to rewire the house better so that the second desktop can be wired as well.

I do have one really stupid question about the initial setup process that I want to just make sure I've got correct, please excuse I suck at networking and this is my first real venture into any of this. @Dexter_Kane

So I was going through the Tek Syndicate, quick and dirty PfSense guide and I was wondering exaclty I should put for Domain in the initial setup of PfSense, https://youtu.be/Q0JFfpG4BWI?t=6m45s. Qain put teksyndicate.com, but what should I put in this place? He said something about windows domain names and I know this is a really dumb question but what would I put? I've never messed with windows domain names or anything of the sort.

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You can put whatever you like in here, unless you already have a domain configured on your network. So just put home.local or whatever you like. It needs to be in the format of something.something

Okay that works. I assume I can just put like my name or something in there for hostname? Nothing in particular there either?

Host name is the name of the computer. You can use whatever you like here as well.

Hey so the motherboard and stuff got here and I went to install off of a usb, but I keep getting this error when I select quick and easy install.

Have you tried the other install option (can't remember what it's called)

I tried doing custom but it kept failing to partition the drive

You may have to manually configure the cylinders and all that, I remember having to do that. Are you installing to a USB disk?

yes

Might be worth using the nanobsd version https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Install_pfSense_nanobsd_2.0_to_thumb_drive

So that was an interesting series of events. I went to try to install PfSense again and when I installed the usb internal header to usb female a header, I put it on the wrong way round. Killed my flash drive, and burned the shit out of my finger when I went to remove it. Sooo, I'm going to try to go grab a cd and then I'm going to try installing off of that.