recommendation for cheap mini-itx board for pfsense

[whitey]

I stand corrected, so the link is a lil' misleading as the newegg site mentions realtek nic's and nothing about intel but it looks like ONLY the IPMI is realtek and the ones you care about are indeen intel i210's.

Cool! Nice lil' board but that is still just abt what I paid for complete setup, and it looks like you have to slap some memory in that guy as well, case, pwr supply, RAM's probably pretty cheap though (hopefully).

 

[jjoyceiv]

I stand corrected, so the link is a lil' misleading as the newegg site mentions realtek nic's and nothing about intel but it looks like ONLY the IPMI is realtek and the ones you care about are indeen intel i210's.

Cool! Nice lil' board but that is still just abt what I paid for complete setup, and it looks like you have to slap some memory in that guy as well, case, pwr supply, RAM's probably pretty cheap though (hopefully).

Indeed you have to go to the tech specs tab to see the Intel NICs. As for power supply, you only need an el cheapo AC adapter; add RAM for ~$20 and an M350 case for $40, just as I posted in your thread, where you said the same, it's about what you paid for your setup, but the ITX board is much more powerful.

Your choice of setup is a viable one, and if OP wants an mITX board specifically, the ASRock is currently the one to get.

 

[whitey]

Yeah about a $40+ difference so not a bad platform at all. :-D I DO have a nice 16GB mSATA ssd in the APU2 board though, feel better abt that than my old tried and true SD card nanobsd image method.

Thanks for info. 'May' have missed it in my other request thread or saw the APU2's and drank the koolaid. Never had a pc-engines board let me down yet though.

 

[ttabbal]

For the asrock board, any idea on total VPN capacity? I'm considering doing one for general use as well and it would be great if I wasn't limited by the firewall.

 

[whitey]

What kind of conn/circuit do you have? I believe either the asrock or APU2 board can scale to handle a 1Gbps conn fairly safely/reliably. I was pulling 40Mbps across my 105MB circuit down from my buddies co-lo that is a 180Mbps conn up/down last night and the CPU hardly broke a sweat.

 

[ttabbal]

I currently have about 150Mbps, for some wiggle room, call it 200. I fully expect either would work fine to route that traffic. What I'm concerned about is encryption at those speeds. Type would be openVPN AES encryption. Not sure about key length.

 

[whitey]

I tested w/ AES-256-CBC encryption algorithm and SHA1 160-bit for Auth Digest Algorithm and pulled 40Mbps @ about 15% CPU utilization, dunno why I could not get more throughput than that but i did have limited testing time and only a simple smb proto copy of a large file from co-lo site to my house across that OpenVPN tunnel.

Wonder if the AES-NI support on the APU2 board was doing the heavy lifting/offloading?