1gbps = 125 megabytes per second

see here: http://uk.hardware.info/reviews/4461/29/amd-a10-6800k–a10-6700-cpu-review-richland-tested-benchmarks-igpu-truecrypt-71-aes-+-aes-ni

a celeron-j or athlon 5350 will therefore do it.

i would suggest going with a supermicro 4-8 core atom board as it has ecc support , intel nics (no realtek junk), and their ipms video/controller so you can remote login to the system without a mouse, keyboard,etc attached to the system. get a board that takes regular ddr3 and no the laptop so-dimms.

@eviljin:

I've been running with the above hardware (Atom setup) since April with squid/squidguard…

Any idea on CPU or RAM usage with those packages? People are always asking and real world number s always help.  :)

Steve

@luckman212:

I just did a fresh install of 2.1.5 (full install) to an mSATA SSD on an APU1C4 system and am getting those same ZFS messages. I understand they are safe to ignore (not having the OP's problem, yet) but I was wondering if we should follow the advice of the warning messages and add the vfs.zfs.prefetch_disable="0" as well as tweaking the vm.kmem_size and vm.kmem_size_max in loader.conf ?

No.

Unless you have a really good reason not to I recommend you use an external access point for wifi rather than a wireless NIC in the pfSense box. There are a load of advantages to doing so and almost no disadvantages.
Even in 2.2 the range of wifi NICs you can use in pfSense is very limited. Using an external AP means it will work.
You can use what wifi type/speed you want, N450, AC etc.
You can place it to provide best coverage.
External access points aren't expensive at all any more.

It might use marginally more power than a wifi card.
By having a card in the box you can often get access to better diagnostic stats directly.
You are connecting directly to the box so there are no cables/switches to fail. (pretty weak reason!)

Steve

I suppose you looked here: http://pcengines.ch/apucool.htm
I took a different approach for the 3rd picture ("Bottoms up" - hold the enclosure base upside down…)

I taped the enclosure to my working table (thus bottoms-down with double-sided adhesive tape -> so it wouldn't move), and inserted the board through the openings for the rj45 holes. (YMMV)

Either way should work I guess...
In doubt, you could try the sequence first without the adhesive pads?

Good luck  ;)

Update on this if anyone else has the same problem. Updating to 2.2 RC does appear to have fixed the kernel panics. The router has been up  for 6 days without a panic which didn't happen before. Thanks!

well… tried it and it seems to work.
Initial connections take some time currently, but maybe a dns issue

http://www.speedtest.net/result/3987542490.png
max would/should be 260/20, but its okay

I would shoot for a J1900 or N2930 board with 2 onboard GigE Intel flavored:

SuperMicro X10SBA - $175 - 13 watts - 4 GigE RJ45's when done - guessing a (35-13 watts savings = 22) - $125 off the utility bill over 5 years

I have built pfSense 2.1.5 x64 and running very smoothly on a 3rd Gen Intel I5-2400 on a Asus mATX board 1 onboard and two Intel PCI-e slotted NICs at 31 watts.  Looking for some more electricity savings and box sizing for my clients.

Dec 14,  - inplace upgrade to 2.2 rc x64 and things went south fast - lost squid, squidGuard, ServiceWatchDog, ipguard, SARG, firewall log reporting.

Every 25 watt savings yields 219 kilowatts/year - or $164 over 5 years at $0.15/kwh

Low power 2 nics onboard and wifi (options) are:  (listed in lowest power consumption first)

1a.  $187 - Jetway NU93-2930 - 101mm squared "NUC" aka "Mini-ITX"  aka "Book Size" on Amazon??  Quad Core 4/4 1.82-2.16Ghz - Intel ARK http://ark.intel.com/products/81073/Intel-Celeron-Processor-N2930-2M-Cache-up-to-2_16-GHz?wapkw=n2930.  Interesting "Shared mPCI-e" port that may be allowed for a mPCI-e GigE card/piggy-tail RJ45 since these cards appears to be full size and will not fit into the 1/2 mPCI-e slots.
NIC chipset is Intel WG82574L

1b -  1a above that is put fully together in a NUC 1.5 case as Jetway JBC375F3AW-2930-B - $255  likely watts are 4.5 plus Wifi SSD = 6-7 watts.  Also a pure "NUC" case barebone is Jetway JBC311U93W-2930-B - $220  - includes wifi 802.11n/BT

2.  The J1900 Intel Family upgraded CPU base freq at 2.0 burst to 2.4 - $90 - GA-J1900N-D3V - BIOS boot battles - I get that on about all boards though! - RTL8111G NICs - only 1/2 mPCI-e slot for wifi, can add a third LAN with slotted nic in PCI slot - 66MHZ bandwidth tops!!  Dont try a dual headed NIC.  Appears to run a bit warm at 52 degrees Celsius - 13 watts

3.  The J1900 Intel Family - $180 - Supermicro X10SBA - smoother BIOS/config boots, upgraded 1xPCI-e (x2) full slot that could take a dual headed GigE - onboard Intel I210 chip GigE nics - upgraded 4x SATA3 internal headers (say NAS).  Added full size mSATA slot for a SSD boot chip.  is it worth the extra $90?  Intel chip premium 30 bucks granted, full size mSATA slot maybe $10, PCI-e x2 full slot definetly make the delta even at $90.  SuperMicro name and reputation - icing on the cake!

Onboard 4 GigE Nics and horsepower for above 500mb/s throughput with more than 10 users.

4.  The Intel Avoton / Rangeley family - double the cores and double the smart Cache same cpu speed as J1900.  Server class ECC memory.  Double to triple the price.  Quad GigE LANs plus iPMI management port make up the $ difference.  RAM capacities go up 4-8 times.  Super value in the Enterprise class with client counts in above 75 range and inter LAN routing in the above 500Mb/sec range.  Likely burn at 21-23 watts.

SuperMicro A1SRi-2758 - $333
SuprMicro A1SAi-2750F-O - $375 -
Gigabyte GA-9SISL - $449
ASRock only 2 GigE lans tons of SATA3 (say NAS) - C2750D4 - $380

Onboard Greater than 4:

5. SuperMicro A1SRM-LN7F-2758 - 7 Onboard Intel flavored GigE RJ45 nics + iPMI - Rangeley C2758 - $436 Amazon Yes - Will be in great demand!!

Another Attempt at home in the quest - Gigabyte GA-H97N-WIFI - no go - LAN2 onboard is Atheros 8161 Wifi is Intel Wireless-AC 7260 and both appear as dead nics for FreeBSD!!  pfSense 2.2 RC x64 crashed big time after addition of only pfBlocker, CPU-G3258, single 8GB DDR3 ram.

It depends.
CF is slower than hdd.if you use it as dns cache, log everything or use ids/ips it will intensively read/write on CF … And will be slow.
I recomand ssd or hdd.

I'm pretty sure its pretty perfect for those things.

The Realtek Gigibit NICs are nowhere near as bad as their older 10/100 NICs. You shouldn't have to worry about using them in the APU since many of the pfSense developers are using those boards.

To use the HH5, or any soho router, as a wifi access point only you need to disable it's on board DHCP server and then connect only to it's LAN ports. That's not going to be a problem on the HH5 since it's WAN is an RJ11 port so no confusion.
Some soho routers have a specific 'access point only' mode that disables everything you don't need and sometimes gives you back extra ports but I doubt the HH5 has that. See:
https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Use_an_existing_wireless_router_with_pfSense

One quirk the HH3 has is that it won't talk to anything outside it's own subnet so I have to connect to it directly to configure it. Since that's only once every few years it's not really an issue! Also my home network is far more complex than it needs to be.  ;)

Steve

@miguelgoncalves:

What about in Europe?

I live in Italy, my personal choice has been building the appliace by myself. You should be able to stay under 500-600€ using atom rangely board with no-ECC RAM support.

If you don't mind to pay extra for import duties from USA I would look to Netgate products, as advised by Jason, or to pfSense products with their support in bundle.

ah right ok.

connection tracking or NAT/port forwarding sounds great !

I have fiddled with my HP 7900 trying a lot of different things to get it to run happily on a non-sinewave UPS and the one thing that worked was to swap out the original power supply which was a Rev: A unit for one marked Rev: B. Lots of these are on ebay and making sure you get a Rev: B unit is usually pretty simple.

This is a Rev: B unit, the version sticker is easy to see, many sellers don't put up a picture or tell you which version so shop carefully.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-pc6019-460974-001-462435-001-240w-max-power-supply-/141446878052?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item20eee41364

This is a Rev: A that will likely be a problem.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Original-LiteOn-PS-6241-5-240-W-Power-supply-460974-001-462435-001-/171553252041?pt=PCA_UPS&hash=item27f15ee2c9

If you are buying one of these 7900s check for the Rev: B power supply or newer unless you are willing to tolerate reboots at every UPS system test or line failure.