System requirements Load Balancing+ Services box + mini-ITX Aps
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Please excuse all the questions, but I figured this was better than the a billion posts. Basically I want to roll with PFsense all around, as load-balancer, AP, and bandwidth management.
First I wondered my what kind of hardware requirements am I looking at in this type of setup:
ADSL >>>–-|
|---PFSensebox1WAN--|--pfsensebox1lan--pfsensebox2wan--box2lantoswitch
CABLE>>---So I want to Load balance multiple lines on the first machine. My thought are that if this machine only does load balancing a p3 with 128 ram should be able to handle it. Then the pfsense box 2 will be the beefier dual core machine with 2 gigs of ram that does the captive portal, squid, traffic shaping, and possibly snort. Several hundred users will have access on the lan side to give an idea of what kind of stress it will be facing. I want to be able to push around 15 megs total download.
What would you say the minimum requirements are for the balancer box?
What would you say the minimum requirements for the second box serving up the services?
Can anyone make a recommendation for Intel over AMD or vice-versa?
Anyone had experience use an X2 or Pentium D?
Has SATA performance improved in 1.2?The reason I wanted to have two boxes is to take care of both the load balancing and traffic shaping. If this is a horrible idea, please feel free to let me know there too!
And lastly has anyone played with pfsense on a mini-ITX board (either a jetway or via board) I wanted to use the Jetway mini-ITX board with an 800 mhz processor, pop 256 or so ram in there. Then I will put a ide > cf converter on it. And then a atheros mini-pci nic using the sintech pci to minipci converter. Any thoughts on this would also be appreciated.
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I want to do something similar, do you have success with this? or found a different solution?
I think could be better to mix pfesense and ipcop(advance proxy+qos+layer7filter):
ADSL >>>–-|
|---PFSensebox1WAN--|--Ipcopbox1lan----box2lantoswitch
CABLE>>---Regards
Alfredo -
It's not a good idea to do the trafficshaping at the lan side of the balancer. If you are entering the bandwidthlimits of the ADSL+CABLE it still can happen that you send out too much traffic to one of the lines where the other one is not fully loaded (connections are distributed round robin). This will lead to overloading one of the lines and result in bad quality of the link. IF you want to do that right you have to have a trafficshaper for each line and a balancer behind it. Not a nice solution, I agree, but hopefully we'll have some nicer integrated multiinterface trafficshaping at some point.