APU2 pfSense box 'on the cheap'

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whitey

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Evening all, had an itch to test one of these new APU2 boards. Ordered on Sunday from pc-engines direct in Switzerland and it arrived today in Colorado to it's proud new home. Figured I would post a mini-build log (ok ok, you all know me, imma bout to flood the forums w/ images lol).

First up some links. Went with this board (APU2C2) as I didn't need the 4gb model (APU2C4) seeing how my 1vcpu/1gb memory pfSense VM FLYS I figured I'd be good and save $20. Yes, I'm cheap and you KNOW this. :-D wink wink

PC Engines apu2c2 product file

Ordered the board $109, the case $10, AC adapter $4, 16gb msata ssd $17, UPS shipping $30 that got it here in three days essentially all the way from 1/2 way across the world. TOTAL damage $170. WAY better in my book than the netgate/pfSense alternatives ($299-349 if memory serves me correct). Bang for buck, value v.s. cost this is hands down in my book the best deal out there...now I KNOW I am gonna get a litany of feedback on 'you could have used this or that' but when it comes to a simple board, 3x intel nics, and a trusted vendor I'm ALL in w/ pc-engines. Used their Alix/APU1 boards in the past and have had nothing but good results out of them but the realtek nics always bugged me although no issues encountered. I can now sleep well at night knowing I now have Intel nics driving my 'DIY/on the cheap reliable/robust pfSense setups'.

Installed pfSense memstick image to usb stick, plopped bootable pfSense usb stick in device, hooked up usb to serial adapter and db9 to db9 null modem cable to that and device and fired up 'screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200' and was off to the races w/ installer. Installer laid down perfectly onto the 16GB mSATA ssd device. WIN!

YEA! Hope you all find some value in this and others can take the guesswork out of homebrew pfSense setups w/out emptying your wallets.
 

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Jannis Jacobsen

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Interested in seeing how these boards will perform.
Have a PcEngines board in a box somewhere, so I know they make good products.

-Jannis
 
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whitey

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CreoleLakerFan said:
Nice. Did you measure power draw? What plugins are you using? Web throughput? What about VPN?
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I have not measured pwr draw, mainly because all I have is a APC 7900 PDU that reads PDU-wide and a small device like this certainly wont even tip it hardly drawing what I assume is somewhere between 10-15watts. Will hook up to my network and run some tests, I have a 105/10 Mbps conn from comcast, sure it can hang w/ everything I throw at it from that guy. Will test VPN as well just for kicks, where this is going (buddy's house) he will not be using VPN but I can stress it here. It's got a quad core 1 Ghz proc, 2GB memory, 3x 1Gbps Intel i211AT nics, and AES-NI support so my bet is it kicks butt and takes names.

EDIT: APU2 pwr envelope.

12V DC, 2.5 mm center pin, center positive. About 6 to 10W depending on CPU load. Recommend 12V adapter rated for at least 1.5A to provide margin for peripherals.
 
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whitey

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Just shutdown my pfSense VM and hooked up the pfSense APU2. This is what a 4GB Linux .iso torrent shows, every bit of my 105/10 my cable modem can push w/ my comcast pkg. 15% CPU usage while saturating conn so I think it's safe to say these would run a 500/500 conn just fine...MAYBE a 1Gbe/1Gbe symmetrical circuit. Need to test VPN here in a bit. Got my site-to-site VPN to my buddies co-lo space on another pfSense dedicated VPN VM so I have to shut that down and setup the site-to-site again on the APU2.

What's a good test there, just slam some data over VPN link site-to-site?
 

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SteveBagley

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whitey said:
...MAYBE a 1Gbe/1Gbe symmetrical circuit.
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I did some rather informal tests with the original APU board last summer by placing it between my Mac Pro and MacBook Pro's gigabit interfaces. Using iperf and with the APU running OpenBSD (my preferred OS for network boxes), from what I remember I could happily achieve 1gb/s transfer in either direction without issue but that it couldn't sustain 1Gb/s in both directions at the same time.

Steve
 
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whitey

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SteveBagley said:
I did some rather informal tests with the original APU board last summer by placing it between my Mac Pro and MacBook Pro's gigabit interfaces. Using iperf and with the APU running OpenBSD (my preferred OS for network boxes), from what I remember I could happily achieve 1gb/s transfer in either direction without issue but that it couldn't sustain 1Gb/s in both directions at the same time.

Steve
Click to expand...
So you were using a couple of ports essentially in 'switching' mode off the APU unit and using iperf between client/server?

Good to know. Was it a APU1 or APU2?

THX!
 
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SteveBagley

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whitey said:
So you were using a couple of ports essentially in 'switching' mode off the APU unit and using iperf between client/server?

Good to know. Was it a APU1 or APU2?
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Apu1 -- it was routing (but no NAT) each mac was in a separate subnet with the APU1 in both on separate ports and set to forward packets. It'd be worth doing a test with pfsense though as well because I think the FreeBSD kernel has better multi core support (or did then at least).

Definitely nice boards.

Steve
 
Patrick

Patrick

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whitey said:
Whatcha mean sold out, I see 6 sold, 4 still avail? Saw this but didn't get a response back from seller a few days back. Older rev version as well.
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Sold out on the PC-Engines site when I look at it.
 
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whitey

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Patrick said:
Sold out on the PC-Engines site when I look at it.
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Oh yeah it may be because the APU2C2 or APU2C4 are the current models. I saw only a few dozen of the 4gb models left a few days back but 500+ of the 2GB models.

EDIT: Yep the C4's are gone for another 10 days or so, 300+ of the C2's left though

PC Engines Order Form
 
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whitey

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OK, got through my VPN woes (slow day/brain fart)

Here's what I can pull between a pfSense 2.3.1 OpenVPN site-to-site tunnel CBC-256 cipher (svr pfSense VM, client pfSense APU2) (35-40Mbps)

Enabling 'BSD cryptodev engine' didn't seem to help at all.

EDIT: Crap forgot to snag a CPU screenshot but I was in now way even close to CPU constrained, 10-15% on VPN transfer. Saw 17% or so on 100Mbps torrent/iso download minus VPN overhead in an earlier test so I think she's got some headroom for growth.
 

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whitey

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Null modem db9 to db9 serial cable, usb to serial adapter for laptop if needed, I usually add a serial port off my esxi hoat to a vm and use screen/minicom to connect.
 
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whitey

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Please review first post in thread for details, apu2c2 is 2gb model, apu2c4 is 4gb model ($8 dollar diff if memory serves me correct).
 
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kuemmel

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Yeah but can you say me the exactly model number of your usb to serial adapter please? :D
 
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whitey

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I don't have my usb to serial adapter handy (buddy is borrowing it) but the one I have works in any Linux distro I have thrown at it, heard horror stories abt some on M$ driver issue wise.
 
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