Good for pfSense?

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mrkrad

Well-Known Member
Oct 13, 2012
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power hog. the P4 and Core 2 era was a serious power and thus HEAT.

I'd just do the L5639 deal man. it's awesome little cpu.
 

BigWorm

New Member
Sep 3, 2012
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Thanks for the feedback! I know it is a lot of power just for pfSense, but damn the price is cheap! But my other worries is the power draw on a much older chip. Sounds like a skip this one and keep looking.
 

Mike

Member
May 29, 2012
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Pfsense used to suck with anything multi-core, but what do i know...
Ipfire would turn your router into something useful with packages for plenty of software and even virtualisation, if you would get a heater like that. No, virtual adapters suck on BSD, yes, also vmwarez paravirtual adapters.
 

morpheus256

New Member
Mar 21, 2012
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Install ESXi on a USB stick, use the 160GB for a datastore, create a VM for PFSense give it 1 core and 512MB of ram and there you have it :) plus you'll have enough ram for a few more VM's
 

bwillcox

Member
Jan 20, 2013
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My pfsense system is one of the 1u Supermicro Atom D525 boxen that Patrick reviewed here previously. They will actually take 8gb of RAM. It Is a sweet little box and keeps up with my 50/25 FiOS with no problem. Probably will be on sale soon with the newer Avoton and Rangeley models coming out too.

The only thing I do not like about it is the power supply fan is kind of whiny on mine.

-b-
 

Jeggs101

Well-Known Member
Dec 29, 2010
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My pfsense system is one of the 1u Supermicro Atom D525 boxen that Patrick reviewed here previously. They will actually take 8gb of RAM. It Is a sweet little box and keeps up with my 50/25 FiOS with no problem. Probably will be on sale soon with the newer Avoton and Rangeley models coming out too.

The only thing I do not like about it is the power supply fan is kind of whiny on mine.

-b-
I was thinking of upgrading, but the only way that happens is if I can ADD more functionality over the Atom D525. For pfsense, the Atom D525 is plenty. I don't think I would run MariaDB on it though.
 

artbird309

New Member
Feb 19, 2013
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I have been thinking about adding a small Avoton and Rangeley system and running ESXi on it with pfsense, a small Windows DC, DNS, and maybe split scoop DHCP, maybe another always running VM.

This way when I take down my All-In-One server or the NAS os everything doesn't die. But its hard to justify the cost and power usage another box would take.
 

BigWorm

New Member
Sep 3, 2012
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I ended up using a spare pc I had.

Motherboard: Gigabyte H61M-S2PV
CPU: Intel Pentium G620

The problem now is I find that this is way overkill as this machine pretty much sits ideal. I still want to figure something else to put it on.
 

Jeggs101

Well-Known Member
Dec 29, 2010
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The G620 has VT-x so I'd just run ESXi 5.5 and have pfsense in a VM
 

33_viper_33

Member
Aug 3, 2013
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If you are building a box with the intent of vitalizing, especially Pfsense, make sure the motherboard and processor supports VT-d in addition to VT-x. VT-d allows you to pass PCI devices through to the guest VM. This is important for pfsense IOT pass through your WAN NIC. Checkout the E3-1200v3 processors. Nice low idle power!
 

cactus

Moderator
Jan 25, 2011
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If you are building a box with the intent of vitalizing, especially Pfsense, make sure the motherboard and processor supports VT-d in addition to VT-x. VT-d allows you to pass PCI devices through to the guest VM. This is important for pfsense IOT pass through your WAN NIC. Checkout the E3-1200v3 processors. Nice low idle power!
Because the Pentiums don't have VT-d, I just make a vSwitch for my untrusted side and give it a physical NIC and a vNIC for pfsense.
 

mrkrad

Well-Known Member
Oct 13, 2012
1,244
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pass through is overrated ;) use SR-IOV with flreset so you can run pfsense in HA or FT mode ;)

seriously. The vt-d 1:1 pass through crap limits your ability to snapshot/vmotion/svmotion/ha/ft plus it can crash the card which can crash the pci bus and take out the entire host.

SR-IOV(1:n:1) cards are plenty, but flreset is rather new. The new hotness is mr-iov (n:n:1) for blades.