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    Small footprint box

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Hardware
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    • H
      hoba
      last edited by

      It is a question of how much bandwidth you need to push and which encryption you have to handle. For you WAN-bandwidth it should be able to handle the encryption on the fly. However 50-100 tunnels on that bandwidth sounds a bit keen imo. Depends on traffic needs however.

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      • C
        covex
        last edited by

        right now the whole setup been used for tech support access to remote pc's via pcanywhere-like soft, access to internal website over the vpn and file transfer. there are plans to add access to a sql server from remote sites in the nearest future.
        what puzzles me is that i have netgear fvx538 device with intel ixp425 533mhg cpu/16mb flash/32mb ram and they claiming that it can run 200 vpn tunnels. it has cavium nitrox on board though.

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        • H
          hoba
          last edited by

          The via C3/C7 have support for hardware encryption inside the CPU (padlock) but afaik we don't have it enabled currently. The last time we tested it (which was a long time ago) it didn't work, that's why we disabled it.

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          • C
            covex
            last edited by

            what about pentium m. is it any good?

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            • H
              hoba
              last edited by

              The question is always "good for what". You can't say that in general. I don't see any cpu (celeron, pentium-m, c3, c7,…) having problems with the specs that you mention unless you run from something with very low megahertz (like a wrap or a soekris).

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              • C
                covex
                last edited by

                :)
                ok, lets put it this way. how far celeron/pentium m with 1gb memory and some intel nics can go as a strictly vpn appliance?
                for example, netgear tells me that ixp425/32mb ram will run 200 tunnels with 60 mbps 3des throughput, or linksys on samsung arm/have_no_idea_how_much_memory device befvp41 will run 50 tunnels with 700kbps.

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                • C
                  cmb
                  last edited by

                  We have decent test environments thanks to the vendors on our recommended vendors page, but we don't have the huge resources that Netgear has for setting up a test environment to simulate 200 tunnels and 60 Mb throughput, etc.

                  My educated guess would be 500 MHz with 256 MB RAM will handle 50-100 IPsec tunnels and your 4/1.5 Mb Internet connection with no problem. Bandwidth would be the primary concern for hardware sizing, and 4/1.5 is so little that pretty much any CPU over 300-400 MHz should be fine, just a matter of having enough RAM for that many tunnels and even 128 MB may be adequate for that.

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                  • C
                    covex
                    last edited by

                    well… as some girls say "size doesn't matter"  ;D
                    even with it's huge resourses netgear can't come up with a decent firmware for it's business-class router and yours is working right out of the box.

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                    • C
                      covex
                      last edited by

                      i've found what i was looking for!  :)
                      http://www.portwell.com/products/detail.asp?CUSTCHAR1=NAD-2081
                      but i has marvell nics on board and i can't find them in the list of supported hardware. are they not supported at all?
                      and also is cavium supported by pfsense?

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                      • Cry HavokC
                        Cry Havok
                        last edited by

                        It looks like the sk driver has supported that chip since FreeBSD 5.3, so pfSense should be fine.  That said, the official FreeBSD documentation doesn't reflect this, just some CVS logs and mailing list postings…

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                        • C
                          covex
                          last edited by

                          i tried to google "marvell 88e8001 pfsense" and all posts there say that it's not working. can't find anything about freebsd.

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                          • C
                            covex
                            last edited by

                            dear experts…
                            between these two boxes
                            http://advantech.com/products/Model_Detail.asp?model_id=1-23A32I&BU=NCG&PD=

                            http://portwell.com/products/detail.asp?CUSTCHAR1=NAD-2081

                            which one would you pick...

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                            • C
                              cmb
                              last edited by

                              I believe that Marvell chipset is the same one Scott has in one of his firewalls at work and hasn't had good luck with. The other box doesn't even list what NIC chipset is used at all, that I see.

                              Given that, my answer would be "neither", unless you can figure out what NIC chipset that other one uses.

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                              • C
                                covex
                                last edited by

                                _One 10/100 Intel 82562 FE port for management
                                Gigabit Ethernet Four 10/100/1000 Mbps GbE ports

                                FWA-700 GbE Controller 4 x Marvell 8053_

                                or

                                _FWA-710 4 x Intel 82573

                                LAN Bypass Two segment on GbE ports_

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                                • dotdashD
                                  dotdash
                                  last edited by

                                  I think your best bet of those would be the FWA-710. Intel GB NICs FTW.

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                                  • K
                                    kapara
                                    last edited by

                                    Did you end up buying the FWA-710?  Looks interesting.  Did you get pricing on the unit?  Would be interested to know.

                                    Thanks

                                    Skype ID:  Marinhd

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                                    • C
                                      covex
                                      last edited by

                                      no… couldn't get through to sales rep there so i got myself nad-2081 http://portwell.com/products/detail.asp?CUSTCHAR1=NAD-2081
                                      nice unit. even though cmb was warning me about marvell chips it works fine. all 4 interfaces were recognized right out of the box.

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                                      • C
                                        cmb
                                        last edited by

                                        covex: Interesting, keep us posted on how that box works out for you.

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                                        • C
                                          covex
                                          last edited by

                                          ok… i installed this box in my office. using only 2 ports (lan and wan) out of 4 (sk0 sk1 sk2 sk3) at the moment. first test (transfer 40MB file inside vpn from remote site) gives me 4mbps (turbo dsl). if you wanna see something else, let me know what to run.
                                          for dmesg please see the attachment.

                                          dmesg.txt

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                                          • C
                                            covex
                                            last edited by

                                            looks like these marvell chips are not as bad as people saying  :)
                                            even though i found on the net tons of complains about them under *nix and windows mine are working Ok and also i got intel box here running as dc and it has marvell giga chip in there too. so i guess it's not the chip that bad it's just bad implementation of it done by asus and co.

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