PFSense Router Hardware suggestions

[James Grossmann]

I'm thinking about setting up a more powerful router, especially with the idea of web content filtering for my family.  Setting anything decent up with dd-wrt or openwrt has been difficult and I think some more flexibility would be available through a more powerful router system.

To that end, do you have suggestions for hardware that would be useable for this?  I'm thinking about a 1u or so server preferably with a pci-e slot or so for perhaps setting up a 10gbps card.  Of course it could be fairly old hardware...  I'm hoping to keep the initial investment to ~$100...

[Eric Wanchic]

Hey James,

  This is what I've purchased to be small and minimal and a barebone device. https://www.amazon.com/Firewall-Micro-Appliance-Gigabit-Intel/dp/B01H2QJTM4/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?keywords=mikrotik+pfsense&qid=1576597997&sr=8-1-spons&psc=1&spLa=ZW5jcnlwdGVkUXVhbGlmaWVyPUFRWDhRTlZWV0RBSFgmZW5jcnlwdGVkSWQ9QTAwNzcxNDkxSDlKTVozUFcxRERVJmVuY3J5cHRlZEFkSWQ9QTA5NzA3NDUxWURFNjRJVENaWDdPJndpZGdldE5hbWU9c3BfYXRmJmFjdGlvbj1jbGlja1JlZGlyZWN0JmRvTm90TG9nQ2xpY2s9dHJ1ZQ==

However, if you don't mind size, finding systems that are just one 1U for under $100 is hard. If you can up the size, there are those Government surplus machines that can be an i5 or i7. This can be useful as if you utilize the virtual machine technology, you could have various systems as it's own virtual machine, all related to firewall activities: VPN, DHCP, SQUID, Parental Proxies, etc.

They could also be a Container too if you desired.

These goverment systems are also great because many of them will only take 4G or 8G max of RAM. My kids are fine with these, but I think my whole family has reached it's limit and needs more RAM, 16GB or more. Actually 4GB is not good anymore for my kids, and we are talking about the Linux OS, not Windows. But for firewall activities, 512MB has always worked for me.

Not sure if you can turn these into a 1U, or at least a 2U with room for your 10GBps cards.

Hope this helps.

Actually, I might try to go this route as well :D

Eric

On 12/16/19 6:31 PM, James Grossmann wrote:

I'm thinking about setting up a more powerful router, especially with the idea of web content filtering for my family.  Setting anything decent up with dd-wrt or openwrt has been difficult and I think some more flexibility would be available through a more powerful router system.

To that end, do you have suggestions for hardware that would be useable for this?  I'm thinking about a 1u or so server preferably with a pci-e slot or so for perhaps setting up a 10gbps card.  Of course it could be fairly old hardware...  I'm hoping to keep the initial investment to ~$100...

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[James Grossmann]

I'd be very curious on more on setting up an i7 or i5 to virtually run multiple firewall activities.  Could you explain more?  Also, I'm not certain about what a "container" is?  excuse my ignorance... 

I was looking at some older supermicro 1u systems on ebay that were around $100, but if I can do more with it, it would be nice to have a bit more power.

Thanks!

James

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[Matthew Lengenfelder]

 you can think of containers as another form of virtual machine it's basically isolating the application as much as possible. for a more in depth explanation read about kubernetes.

Also, there are a lot of already built containers that make it easy to install and use an app in an isolated environment.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubernetes

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[Eric Wanchic]

Yes, kubernetes is the popular kid in town. Previously it was docker, which is still good.

Basically, a container is an amplified chroot environment. In other words, if all your VMs were linux based, instead of creating multiple linux OS machines, which is duplicating the same code over and over again, taking up space, lets just use one kernel, multiple threads, and say have multiple nginx environments utilizing the virtualization of the CPU, but just one OS. But you 'think' you have multiple OSs.

That's an over generalization.

Eric

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[James Grossmann]

OK, yeah, that's right, I didn't make that connection, but I remember about docker containers.  Interesting.

Thanks,

James

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