Low power options for firewall / pfsense / opnsense

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msg7086

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May 2, 2017
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Ah, thanks for the info on the power use. I'd really like lower, but that's an option thanks!
The reason I brought this up is because you'd weigh the cost of the box and the cost of the power bill. A 10w difference is about $10/year on the power bill. You may not want to save $30 on the power bill over 3 years while spending $100 more on the box itself. The 3020 SFF is at about $60-80 mark right now. There are also similar options from HP and Lenovo I think, though I'm not familiar with.
 
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Sean Ho

seanho.com
Nov 19, 2019
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Lenovo equivalent to 3020 (Haswell) would be like the m73, m83, m93. Both in SFF and uSFF (Tiny). Super cheap nowadays. Skylake are only $10-20 more expensive and can run very cool.
 

Mithril

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Sep 13, 2019
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The reason I brought this up is because you'd weigh the cost of the box and the cost of the power bill. A 10w difference is about $10/year on the power bill. You may not want to save $30 on the power bill over 3 years while spending $100 more on the box itself. The 3020 SFF is at about $60-80 mark right now. There are also similar options from HP and Lenovo I think, though I'm not familiar with.
In this case it's not about power bill, but about time (and cost) on battery/generator/solar (one day). By the time you add in conversion and other losses thats you know 7-8AH from a 48V battery, OR 10W of load that could be something else. I'm looking at power use, then cost and willing to take the tradeoff in performance. A lot of the suggestions here make a lot of sense for power use and then performance at the tradeoff of cost. Which is something ALSO interesting, and I'm likely to pick up something in that range for other uses. But, that isn't this usecase.

There are a bunch of inexpensive SFF machines, and some ITX boards with celerons and such but getting real power use info is tricky.
 

PD_ZFS-User

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Jul 13, 2018
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Needs/requirements:
Low power at idle (lets say 20w or less, lower is better) as the highest priority
Not a vendor locked platform, so either x86 or something that could run a hypervisor.
2+ Gigabit ports (not realtek, or troublesome) and/or at least one PCIe slot
Either ATX power or NON proprietary DC power (nothing that must have a specific OEM power brick).
Cost, Under 200. Cheaper is better. I prioritize this over max performance.

The intended use is as a backup firewall for extended power outages so it will be running on solar/generator/battery. Thus passing traffic at 1G is nice to have but if not thats fine. I already have cases, power supplies, ram, NICs etc so a bare board or barebones option is fine.

I've looked at the tiny mini micro thread and it seems like the ones with 2+ ports or pcie lanes are both higher performance and higher cost than I need.
Yes, I am looking at more batteries etc, but all of that adds up too
Mithril,

Perhaps an Edgerouter X loaded with Open WRT would meet your requirements. It's very low power, max of 5 watts according to the data sheet and flashing it to OpenWRT would avoid vendor lock-in : https://openwrt.org/toh/ubiquiti/edgerouter_x_er-x_ka

It has 5 Gigabit ports (you would have to research which company manufactures them, it's not listed on the data sheet)

It can be powered via 24V passive PoE or 12VDC barrel connector (looks pretty standard).

Price is around $70.

Good luck with your search

Edit: Add the review done by STH: https://www.servethehome.com/ubiquiti-er-x-review-getting-into-the-edgerouter-x/
 
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