yeah, may need more ram for squid3, etc

add some ebay intel gigabit nic cards

What I mean is that board is one of many generic boards coming out of china from many sources. It's unlikely anyone here will ever have tried that particular board. The only thing you can get is a general impression of the pitfalls of ordering directly from an unknown manufacturer in China and those are in the Vendors sub-forum.
I can see no reason why that board wouldn't work. All the components on it are well tested with pfSense. However there's no real way of knowing unless you can persuade the supplier to try pfSense/FreeBSD on it. Sometimes you get a badly written bios that won't play nicely with anything other than Windows.

Steve

As a few have already suggested, look into the Intel Atom Rangeley.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Atom_microprocessors#.22Rangeley.22_.2822_nm.29_3

There is also support for AES-NI.
https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Are_cryptographic_accelerators_supported
Look at the difference in speed 3sec to 0.1sec.

I know pfsense offers an appliance with this chip or I've had great experience with the Supermicro C2758 (8-core) or C2558 (4-core).

I don't have experience with the J1900 but I've seen several threads where people have listed various issues.

Thank you for the suggestions.

I don't have a specific problem. I am looking to learn what to look for. It seems there is a lot of art and little science in science in sizing a system. It's understandable as every situation is so unique. How much load an IPSEC tunnel creates vs OpenVPN or which packages are running.

@lasersyxx:

@ u/messerchmidt

I was actually look at the Atoms. You say that it is faster than the i3? How so, all of the benchmarks I looked at show the i3 being fast….do the 8 cores help with pfSense? Also, would the Atom be able to handle pfSense with all of the packages? I plan on running everything I possibly can to experiment, and I do not want to be restricted by hardware. I do like the idea of that many Intel Nics though... :P

@ u/maturola

I was actually look at those exact case, that is, if I go with a rack mount. I was looking at this new case from Silver Stone that just hit the market, should be on Amazon/Newegg within two weeks.

http://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=536
Either option looks great, but I would probably go with the mesh front panel for the dust filters.

As already stated, the Atom is very low power witch add up when you have your firewall up 24/7, should not hit any performance wall anytime soon.

I like the silverstone, if you like those type check out CHENBRO SR30169T2-250 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811123173)

I personally went with 1U, since i have a 2U NAS Plus 1U UPS so all 3 look great an clean on a small 6U Rack Cabinet.

Yes, I added my info there. I tested my hardware with PC-BSD 10.1 and it ran fine.
Feel free to add your hardware info to that bug report.

Steve

Do a search for BLKD2500CCE, it have 2 SATA and it should works for you, Dual NiC, Dual Core Atom with 2 SATA & VGA

One of those MOBO + Mems + M350 case should be right around your budget.

edit: Jetway NC9MGL-525 should work too.

@thresh:

Sometimes i get ddos attack (2-3 gbit ).
Can i block that attack with pfsense ?

No.

@TooMeeK:

READ again: Adjust values to Your uplink.

Should not run DNS on WAN in the first place. For any other server that needs to be accessible, the suggested values are just not usable.

You'll need a null modem mini USB cable  ;)

It still freezes when flooding with UDP packets…

On the SYN  ACK scripts, you cant reach any servers behind pfsense. Like they go offline. Its still responsive (GUI) and ping works fine...

Give me an IP to test and I will prove it ;)

Mine is off and its still not responsive.

@al88ch:

Dear's

any idea about the recommended hardware specs for pfsense to be installed on virtual box:
RAM/HDD/CPU/so on

Thanks

Hardware Spec to install pfsense on a virtual environment are the same as if yo install it directly to the hardware, You need to be more specific on what else you will be planning on running on that same Virtual environment

@tirsojrp:

According to CompuLab their toys works with pfSense.

This is great. Although, fitlet-i is comparable with (a bit cheaper) Shuttle DS437, fitlet-X-LAN is better option when more than 2 NICs are required…

APU should be fine for 88Mbps. If you want to run Squid or Snort you should use an mSATA or a real HD though. Running from flash (SD card) will ware it out with a package that writes frequently like Squid.

Steve

I was a bit late reading that post and have already upgraded to 2.2 but I've got two other identical units with 2.1.5 in case it ever fails.

Upgrade went smoothly and all works well after although I found it had removed all packages I had installed, nothing major though I only really used blinkled which I've reinstalled and works fine on 2.2. Package installation is also faster than I remember too.

There's maybe a slight increase in UI performance, more noticable on some pages than others. The display issue in Chrome on Code-Red theme is also fixed in 2.2.

Thanks virgiliomi,

I'm fairly sure that I am not going to need more then 2 NICs for my home setup, I'm only going to have a HP Procurve 8 port Gb dumb switch hanging off the LAN port with a wireless router hanging off that for the mobile devices.

Looks like the J1900 is the way to go then.

Out of curiosity, is there much beneift in maxing out the RAM to 8Gb over 2 or even 4Gb, keeping in mind I want to run Snort, Squid etc.
I'm also assuming that a small 60Gb SSD is more then sufficient, correct?

Next step, wife approval  ;D

The unfi $70 AP should work just fine..  It supports up to 4 SSIDs and vlans.  I am currently running my wifi on different segment using pfsense, and also have a guest on a different vlan.  So I limit what the wifi can do, and on the guest - other than pinging my pfsense gateway it can not talk to pfsense, can not talk to any other segments lan, wlan, dmz and doesn't even use pfsense for dns.  The dhcp on that vlan hands out public dns to use.

With the unifi ap you can run their free controller software in a vm in the cloud if you want, etc.  And get lots of info about your wlan users and guest.  Have your guest via a portal, can use voucher system to auth if you want, etc. etc.. Lots of bells and whistles.  Clearly that would give you better coverage and features then putting a wifi card into pfsense.  Your talking peanuts for cost of the AP.. Like 35$ more than some wifi card you would put into pfsense.

Got the same, Asus AM1M-A, Athlon 5350, SSD

Best/Least I've managed is about 24,5W draw from wall socket (also using dual slot Intel Pro1000MT NIC).

ECC, haven't managed getting it to work. Tried two different brands, had Hynix and Kingston's unbuffered ECC sticks lying around.

FreeBSD, enabling CPU throttling leads to system crash (unless I disable C6 state in BIOS)

No such issues under Linux but haven't seen lesser energy expenditure there either.

Disabling one/two/three "cores" does not make any difference at all in power draw. Only undervolting works to an extent.

I could probably shave couple of Watts off by making the cooling passive (remove fan) but I am not sure it's worth the trouble. None of the big custom heatsinks seems compatible to fittings used with AM1 socket.

There isn't enough data in that bit of the crash. If the system saved a crash dump, submit it and/or copy paste the whole thing here, or at a minimum get the panic message and the backtrace (After the "db> bt" part of the crash dump output)