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    How Good is Pfsense now?

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Off-Topic & Non-Support Discussion
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    • S
      sullrich
      last edited by

      I'll say this again, I have a site that has 3000 users, 300 concurrent sessions on the captive portal and the site operator has never complained about it being slow…

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      • H
        hoba
        last edited by

        @hoba:

        Can you tell us what version you used that showed these problems? Concerning the captive portal I have to agree that it is slower than m0n0's CP atm. We haven't found the issue yet. The CP is nearly a 100% copy of the m0n0 code so all other features should work the same way like with m0n0. However I hope that we'll find the issue that causes the capture page to be that slow.

        These tests actually have been done on wraps and on these platforms the CP is slower compared to m0n0wall. pfSense doesn't aim at these  platforms but I hope we can speed it up there as well some day.  ;)

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        • Z
          ZGamer
          last edited by

          I've run 1.0b2 for 6months without a problem functioning in the following fashion, before that beta .84 for at least 4 months. Both downtimes were not because of pfsense….one was from a failure in the generator to kick in and the other was someone tripping on the cord....oooops.

          1. PPTP server for about 5 users (with using LDAP to AD2003)
          2. IPSEC site-to-site link with two sites
          3. DHCP
          4. DNS
          5. NAT

          Dell Poweredge 1550
          dual 10/100 nics
          512megs ram

          Older versions had problem with the web config crashing.....ssh in and kill the hung php process....no downtime though. Since version 1.0beta2 I haven't had any problems running the stuff mentioned above, the only areas of problems that come for me are with my atheros wireless card (trying to run an all-in-one box at home) where the driver takes a dive when transfering large files.

          –------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
          pfSense Documentation Wiki
          Need Commercial Support?
          Personal Blog

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          • W
            Wasca
            last edited by

            Hi ZGamer

            That sounds very promising. I'm looking at putting PFSense on a DELL PE860 2.8GHZ Pentium D with 512MB RAM. I'm hoping the hardware will work with the latest build.

            Anyone got any good reports on running 2 boxes with CARP, mainly for failover. I'm also considering doing this.

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            • H
              hoba
              last edited by

              http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,3331.msg20183.html#msg20183

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              • J
                Juve
                last edited by

                It's the best…..really

                I have many clusters over the world now... with one site with more than 4K users and more than 50K sessions per second full time. Some of them running pptp server with more than 50 concurrent connections, some having outgoing loadbalancing over multiple WAN...

                Pfsense is stable, reliable and fucking powerful

                It Roxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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                • S
                  sullrich
                  last edited by

                  @Juve:

                  It's the best…..really

                  I have many clusters over the world now... with one site with more than 4K users and more than 50K sessions per second full time. Some of them running pptp server with more than 50 concurrent connections, some having outgoing loadbalancing over multiple WAN...

                  Pfsense is stable, reliable and fucking powerful

                  It Roxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

                  ;D :) ;D :)

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                  • P
                    pk
                    last edited by

                    I don't know what I did wrong with my config then, because I can't get 100 users on a PFsense box without it blowing up on me.  I would like to take a look at your config.xml file for one setup with load balancing + captive portal.  FTP and Games must work to keep customers happy.  M0n0wall works great, but does not do load balancing, so we have to run two boxes and split our network up.

                    When I configured mine, FTP would not work right, or was very slow, and games didn't work.  The biggest problem I had was the captive portal blowing up and crashing the box.  We are using the Perimeter™ B2/B4 Firewall (1GHz VIA C7, 256MB DDR2 533, 256MB IDE-Flash).  We have 100 users, normally 60-70 at a time.

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                    • P
                      pixeldoc2000
                      last edited by

                      pfsense 1.0.1 is running rock solid for 157 days (with UPS) without error as my NAT PPPOE router and PPPTP VPN server at home on old hardware and has transfered around 100 GB + by now.

                      look at attached Screenshots for some more details.

                      i'm using pfsense since pre 1.0 without much hassle execept for some trouble with outgoing ftp connections through nat (ftp helper doesn't work very well) Games working flawless with pfSense.

                      System Specs:
                      Version: 1.0.1 release
                      Platform: pfsense (HDD)
                      Packages: snort, openntp and some more
                      Total Uptime: about 200 Day's +
                      CPU: Intel P1-233MHz
                      RAM: 128MB
                      NIC: 3x 3Com 3C905C
                      WAN Type: PPPOE, dynamic IP, German ISP with 24 disconnect

                      Great work pfsense team, keep it going on!

                      ![pfsense uptime.JPG](/public/imported_attachments/1/pfsense uptime.JPG)
                      ![pfsense uptime.JPG_thumb](/public/imported_attachments/1/pfsense uptime.JPG_thumb)
                      ![pfsense traffic.JPG](/public/imported_attachments/1/pfsense traffic.JPG)
                      ![pfsense traffic.JPG_thumb](/public/imported_attachments/1/pfsense traffic.JPG_thumb)

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                      • T
                        tacfit
                        last edited by

                        Yeah, pfsense is bitchin. I've been using 1.2 Beta 1 for 3 months now and haven't had a single failure. I moved off Microsoft's ISA 2004 firewall.

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                        • V
                          Valhalla1
                          last edited by

                          @tacfit:

                          I moved off Microsoft's ISA 2004 firewall.

                          :o   thank goodness for that!  :)

                          back in the day, I setup OpenBSD at my network edge and built the pf.conf by hand, mainly to learn, and liked it a lot. eventually got lazy, and setup a soekris/m0n0wall, but wished it was openbsd based or at least had pf.  then I heard about pfsense, but I just sort of followed the progress forever and never tried it.    eventually my network expanded and outgrew m0n0 and I required some of pfsense's better features like loadbalance, and I'm pretty impressed.  I don't use captive portal nor have tons of users, I just have a handful of very bandwidth hungry users and I wouldn't use anything other than pfsense at this point

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