I built my PFSense box on Thursday and have been using it since. This is my first foray in to using PFSense for a real environment, I've only played with it in Virtual Machines before now.
Overall I'm very impressed. I am using the 2.2 RC as it has the required driver for my motherboards Intel i210-V ethernet chip
I went with an i340-T4 from Intel for LAN use but I found the bridging on PFSense to not be very good it introduced errors. This is likely a 2.2 bug that'll get fixed so I'm not bothered and I have found using a dedicated switch to not only be more affordable, offer twice as many ports but also uses less electricity anyway.
My only disappointment with 2.2 RC right now is that Squid doesn't work and each new snapshot of 2.2 seems to further break Squid3 compatibility requiring more and more modifications to get it functioning. But this isn't PFSense or the Squid3 maintainers fault, it's just what happens with an active development period and I accept that, if I wanted stable I could have rolled my own drivers and used PFsense 2.1 but I wanted to be on the bleeding edge.
I'm using a Pentium G3220, this is a Haswell architecture Dual Core, 3MB Cache 3GHz CPU. It fluctuates in clock speed from 100MHz to 3GHz so it has a very wide range perfect for router use.
I paired that with 16GB of RAM expecting to make heavy use of Squid3 but of course it doesn't work yet. And then I am using an Asrock MATX board the H97M PRO4 which was chosen because of its 1150 socket, four DIMM slots, mATX form factor and Intel LAN.
The performance is very good. I've installed two packages so far, I'm going to wait to install anything else until 2.2 is officially released as there are incompatibilities. The two packages I'm using are BandwithD and ntopng - Both very good and work fine, I'm incredibly impressed by ntopng but that probably is due to it being my first time using it more than anything.
Overall my build including a gold rated modular power supply & case, plus all the other parts I already mentioned including that i340-T4 (sourced from ebay) only set me back about £270. I'm confident if one were to supplement that i340-T4 with a single port Intel NIC instead you could easily build a capable PFSense router for under £200. I repurposed a Hard Drive and the 4x4GB RAM modules from old kit so they don't factor in to my costings.
I'm very much looking forward to the final release of 2.2.
Overall I'm very impressed. I am using the 2.2 RC as it has the required driver for my motherboards Intel i210-V ethernet chip
I went with an i340-T4 from Intel for LAN use but I found the bridging on PFSense to not be very good it introduced errors. This is likely a 2.2 bug that'll get fixed so I'm not bothered and I have found using a dedicated switch to not only be more affordable, offer twice as many ports but also uses less electricity anyway.
My only disappointment with 2.2 RC right now is that Squid doesn't work and each new snapshot of 2.2 seems to further break Squid3 compatibility requiring more and more modifications to get it functioning. But this isn't PFSense or the Squid3 maintainers fault, it's just what happens with an active development period and I accept that, if I wanted stable I could have rolled my own drivers and used PFsense 2.1 but I wanted to be on the bleeding edge.
I'm using a Pentium G3220, this is a Haswell architecture Dual Core, 3MB Cache 3GHz CPU. It fluctuates in clock speed from 100MHz to 3GHz so it has a very wide range perfect for router use.
I paired that with 16GB of RAM expecting to make heavy use of Squid3 but of course it doesn't work yet. And then I am using an Asrock MATX board the H97M PRO4 which was chosen because of its 1150 socket, four DIMM slots, mATX form factor and Intel LAN.
The performance is very good. I've installed two packages so far, I'm going to wait to install anything else until 2.2 is officially released as there are incompatibilities. The two packages I'm using are BandwithD and ntopng - Both very good and work fine, I'm incredibly impressed by ntopng but that probably is due to it being my first time using it more than anything.
Overall my build including a gold rated modular power supply & case, plus all the other parts I already mentioned including that i340-T4 (sourced from ebay) only set me back about £270. I'm confident if one were to supplement that i340-T4 with a single port Intel NIC instead you could easily build a capable PFSense router for under £200. I repurposed a Hard Drive and the 4x4GB RAM modules from old kit so they don't factor in to my costings.
I'm very much looking forward to the final release of 2.2.