Hello. I'm looking for an upgrade to my existing consumer hardware to a more enterprise level of security for my home network. Currently I have a net gear r7000 router and an 8 port gigabit ethernet switch. At any given time i have 4 clients on the switch and 6-8 on wireless. I am interested in purchasing a router/firewall that will handle dns and ship and use the net gear as an AP. II'm stuck between a Ubiquity EDGE Router Lite and a pfsense box running on the new amd apu Alix with 2 gigs of ram. Can anyone help justify one or the other? One is 99 bucks...While the other is about 220 bucks..is it worth the premium?
It really depends on how nitty gritty you want to get.
If you just want something that works, get the Ubiquity. If you want to control stuff at a brief level or right down in to even the most obscure stuff, use pfsense.
If you don't have that good a knowledge of networking either you may find Pfsense to have a sharp learning curve at first.
I have some decent knowledge of networking. I really dont need to do anything crazy, no VLANs or VPNs or anything like that. I just want the graphs, the enhanced reliability and possibility for higher throughput in the future. I am also fairly interested in the network level anti-virus in pfsense. Does it work well?
For reference, there is a fair amount of torrent traffic on my network-- and I have a 25/5 connection.
http://www.ubnt.com/edgemax
- Performance
- (Layer-3 base forwarding) 1,000,000 pps for 64-byte packets. Line rate (3 Gbps) across all three ports for 512-byte packets and higher
- CPU
- Dual-core MIPS64 processor with hardware acceleration for packet processing and encryption/decryption
- Ethernet
- 3 RJ-45 Gigabit Ethernet ports
- Memory
- 512 MB DDR2 RAM
- Storage
- 2 GB
- Console
- 1 RJ-45 serial console port
The antivirus stuff on pfsense is part of a proxy server, so it only works for http traffic. I also found that it slowed my browsing speed too much.