You should ask pc-engines directly about your concerns with the temperature.
They are usually very swift in replying.

Hmm, does sounds broken then unfortunately. 😕

Steve

I know this topic is quite old, but I'd like to add my own & successful try to build a low-cost pfSense router.

In detail it was just projected to be an upgrade to an old D-Link 524 in a mechatronics lab envoirment, wit just a few features - like static IP assignment of clients via their MAC adress & MAC-Whitelisting as well as blocking access to the internet from or to the lab equipment [including several Siemens Siematic PLCs, a Kubota robot arm, Several printers and a professional 3D Printer], but not the PCs.

The D-Link was used as an AP instead, this saving the cost of buying a wifi card that isn't faster anyway...
[I hope 802.11ac support and drivers for the Intel 7260ac will soon come!].

I used an ASRock J1900M Mainboard [€ 40],
an LC-Power 1400 Case w/ 250W PSU [€ 40],
3 Realtek 811x NICs with PCIe x1 [€ 5 each]
as well as a Corsair ValueRAM 2x 2GB DDR3-1333 Kit [€ 30]
and a Transcend 32GB 2,5" SSD [€ 20]

Which totaled around € 145 in parts and € 150 with shipping.

Since it neither needed VPN or any crypto handling besides it's HTTPS web interface, performance is sufficient.
On the WAN side, this unit just goes straight into a Cable CPE with roughly 150M/10M, and it can fully saturate that [before the D-Link capped it with it's 100M ports...

This setup was easy to deploy and fully satisfied the customer's needs, as it was just the needed and reasonable priced upgrade to a customer/SoHo router and while being cheaper than the famous Fritz!Box routers, it had significantly more features and didn't have arbitrary and artificial limitations [like MAC-Whitelisting only on the Wireless interface and limited to 25 devices like the D-Link].

Sadly, with some of those cheap ASRock boards being in low supply, espechally the QC5000M [same board, but with an AMD A4-5000, thus having AES-Ni], the few offers on Amazon ramp up prices to 300% or more - at least in Germany.

But I'm pretty shure some Celeron J4xxx or J5xxx as well as potentially upcoming, low-end Ryzen-based SoCs will fill the gap without getting too pricy.

Great. Thanks for the follow-up.

Steve

It seems that em(4) NICs have no such issue on multi-threaded PPPoE, including i340-t4 and i350-t4.

I know you are asking for something other than a Chelsio card, however, I have been running a Chelsio T50-SO-CR 2-Port SFP+ card without issue for approximately a year. It was simply plug and play with my Supermicro X10SDV-8C-TLN4F board.

This card has been working with pfSense v2.4.3 and prior versions without issue.

The left port is connected to a Meraki Switch and the right port is connected to a Cisco Switch. Everything works great.

JB

I would be surprised if that is what solved it. The behaviour really looks hardware related.

Still, it would be nice if that has resolved it. 😉

Steve

I don't believe there is a FreeBSD/pfSense driver for that chipset. The USB side was never added to the existing driver.
https://wiki.freebsd.org/dev/ath_hal%284%29/HardwareSupport

Steve

The biggest factor there is how much of that traffic will be over OpenVPN. If the majority of it is and you want to get anywhere near 2Gbps you're going to need the fastest CPU you can get hold of. Each OpenVPN process is single threaded so less cores at higher speeds wins here if you have only a few tunnels.

Steve

@stephenw10 said in Temperatures on fanless systems:

I would probably consider swapping out two of the fans for quieter ones then or fitting a speed reducer resistor maybe.

Seems like a good idea. I am looking for some 1U 40mm fans that are quiet. Don't need too high a cfm, so I am hoping it shouldn't be hard to find.

@stephenw10 said in Temperatures on fanless systems:

Those fans are probably moving waaay more air than is required for that CPU.

True. And that was the crux of the question. If 39C or 40C idle is not too bad, then I can skip all fans and just run it fanless.

Over time, like I mentioned, I will move it in another 1U and then I could buy the fans that fit that chassis correctly. This current 1U chassis is a 4 bay server, and having 4 drive bays when I am using none of them seems like a waste. I plan to use it for a small server running ESXi on bare metal and running 2 - 3 VMs in the future.

But that is going to happen after some time. Currently my 2 kids don't leave me with enough time to tinker around.

The latest update: looks like the issue was solved!

I have returned back all the initial settings, except MAC address cloning (spoofing) on WAN interface. And now MiniPC box works absolutely fine!

Yes, exactly you can't use the shell script to start it as that just calls the standard files created by the package. You need to call the binary directly as I wrote above.

Be sure to check the post I linked above too. The actual commands you want to use in the shellcmd are:

/usr/bin/nice -20 /usr/local/sbin/LCDd -c /root/LCDd.conf > /dev/null &

and

/usr/bin/nice -20 /usr/local/bin/lcdproc C T U &

Assuming your customised LCDd.conf file is in /root.

Steve

I mean leave the pfSense default settings unless you have some really good reason to change them.

Steve

The calculation used here doesn't seem too terrible:
https://forum.netgate.com/topic/103216/pfsense-hardware-for-home-router-openvpn-performance

There were a number of comparisons to actual throughput there and it was not massively out.

As states there though there are many variables.

Steve

@perforado said in Both SSDs vanish from rpool -> pfSense hangs and does not recover:

Gaffatape was gone the visit after that.

Mmm, I think that says it all. Someone went in there and removed it when they shouldn't have. You have a rogue admin IMO. 😉

Steve

Nice! What are the specs on that? You got internal pics? Looks pretty powerful from the hardware guide.

Unfortunately that's way outside my budget for hardware to experiment with so I've never had the opportunity to poke about with it's fan controls. I doubt it's much different to the XTM-800 though, or any of Watchguards recent Lanner units. Just a matter of identifiying the SuperIO chip in use then poking registers to find how it's connected.

There are probably some fan settings available in the BIOS though.

Steve

@signalz and @stephenw10
Thanks both for you answers. It appears i have no chance using the wifi card onboard, as an host AP. I will move on then...
Regarding the setup, it is a bit overkill , yes. I have a 35W i3 CPU and 8GB RAM with a normal HDD. I read about the inutility of having a SSD in this case. THe power supply has 250W and it is the smallest one i could find to fit in a 1U case.
Thank you again guys.

Not that I'm aware of. If shows enabled there it should be doing it's thing.

Steve