How Far Have You Scaled Your PFS Box?
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I'm actually in the middle of this argument with one of my bosses. He wants Cisco, mainly because of paid support - which I completely understand. I told him I'm more comfortable with pfsense, I know what it can and can't do. I don't know anything about Cisco IOS.
Plus the Cisco ASA, if you want to get anywhere near 1gpbs, you're looking at $190,000. I'm sorry, it's just not worth it.
He may eventually overrule me on this, and make me dump pfsense, however I really, really don't think he's going to.
We have paid commercial support. See the front page of pfsense.org :)
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I have been running pfSense for a while now and I have it running everywhere.
At work I have 3 sets of pfSense firewalls. Primary and failover. They work beautifully. They are all running on Dell Optiplex GX260's which if my memory serves me right, they are around 2.4Ghz each with 1GB RAM and 40GB HD. I originally had 3COM 3c2000 NIC's all over the place, but I had lots of issues so now I run Intel PRO1000's across the board.
Each box runs rock solid and has about 300 computers behind them. We run a lot services from the company, primarly an offsite backup service for a few hundred clients so we have a ton of traffic all the time.
We recently upgraded to a 100mbit internet connection and our ISP recommended we purchase a Cisco 7204 for somethign like $9,000. Well that didn't fly so I slapped pfSense on another GX260 and turned off the firewall so it was just a router and we stress tested the bad boy and were able to achieve a solid 300mbit, which was more than enough. So I ended up paying a grand total of $0, which is just amazing.
I would be able to replace my Cisco PIX's if pfSense could do Policy NAT because we have a few hundred IPSEC Tunnels and as you can imagine, subnets get claimed really fast, so policy NAT is a must.
I recently made a purchase on eBay of 50 Intel Pro 100's, so now whenever one of my coworkers, friends, relatives is in need of a firewall I just tell them to go find a working peice of crap computer and I will set them up an awesome firewall. Needless to say I have a few dozen pfSense boxes runnning at there homes and an IPSEC tunnel to each, for helping them out with comptuer problems, file sharing, etc. I have running at my house an old school P2 300Mhz Overclocked to 450Mhz (thats such an insane increase if you think about it!) with 256mb RAM, 6gb HD. It runs flawlessly. My record uptime was 290 something days, but ofcourse the power went out and killed my record (time for a ups right?).
My only complaint is about the PPTP GRE NAT issue, but really, I love pfSense and have been nothing but pleased over and over and over. Whenever I speak with other IT guys and friends I always promote pfSense, it is simply amazing and well on its way to becoming a Cisco/Checkpoint killer, the other boys cant really hold a candle to pfSense.
Kudos to all you guys who help make pfSense what it is, you rock!!!
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Our office has a single PII 400 with 128MB RAM and 5 3COM 3C905-TX NICs, 3 of which are currently in use. We have about 50 constant users, and our average bandwidth usage is around 6MBps of our cable connection and 1-1.5 of our DSL. The only service we use so far is ntop, so it doesn't seem to be overloaded yet. This machine was supposed to be just a demo for the bosses, but ended up working so well that we put it in production and it stayed there. Within a few months I'm hoping we'll get permission to buy a new system for it so I can get better traffic filtering in place.
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Yep, I'll be at the datacenter tomorrow, I'll take some pictures of our cage with my phone. We've got 6 6850's in production right now, mostly for database servers. Then another 40 or so 1950's/1850's in our cage, all behind the firewalls - which again, are 1950's for the time being.
So where are those pictures at foo! ??? ;D
-M@
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Was in a different post!
http://box.nevernet.com/~foo/IMG00036.jpg
10 6850's, a bunch of 1950's, and a few 1750's. Few Sun boxes, too. In about a week we're going to have a gigantic 3Par (san) cabinet that everything pulls from.
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Was in a different post!
http://box.nevernet.com/~foo/IMG00036.jpg
10 6850's, a bunch of 1950's, and a few 1750's. Few Sun boxes, too. In about a week we're going to have a gigantic 3Par (san) cabinet that everything pulls from.
/drool
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After few day of installing, testing, transferring existing rules/routes, and some testing again I can proudly say: New pfsense firewall/router is working instead of Alliedtelesyn Rapier 24i.
I have installed pfsense on Intel sr1350ahlx (dual core xeon, 2 GB RAM, 2x500 GB HDD in RAID 1, 2 integrated Gb NICs and additional PCI-X 2 port Intel Gb NIC). This machine is serving 1 WAN connection (E1, soon double E1) 4 VLANs (in one of VLAN's I have internal routers for 9 other networks), 1 DMZ and one admin network. On VLAN port VLANs are distributed trough gigabit port on AT8000s/24 switch and fiber optics.
Altogether there is around 400 PC's, 30+ servers (Windows and UNIX) few-dozen print-servers, etc.
For now load is minimal. Tomorrow I am adding some IPSec tunnels.
So far this is my biggest pfSense installation.
Sasa
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My biggest pfSense installation to date is a pair of Dell 1950s that have been running 1.01 flawlessly for something over a year now. They're in a cabinet at a data center, supporting a handful of web servers, a mail and DNS server and a few (non-public) database servers. 95th %ile traffic is around 2 megabits, but we get spikes up to 10 during the day.
I had hoped to use pfSense for the firewall when we moved into our new office space last summer, too, but the Pentium III box I had handy to install the firewall on wouldn't boot either 1.01 or the 1.2 beta, or anything else with a FreeBSD kernel. I never did find out why. Fortunately, it boots OpenBSD just fine, so at least I still get pf, even without the web interface and the additional features I like in pfSense.
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I had hoped to use pfSense for the firewall when we moved into our new office space last summer, too, but the Pentium III box I had handy to install the firewall on wouldn't boot either 1.01 or the 1.2 beta, or anything else with a FreeBSD kernel. I never did find out why. Fortunately, it boots OpenBSD just fine, so at least I still get pf, even without the web interface and the additional features I like in pfSense.
You should retry with the upcoming 1.3 release which will be based on freebsd 7. Also make sure your bios is up2date and maybe exchange the cdrom. freebsd is sometimes picky about cdroms.
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Will take a few more pictures on Monday. We've grown considerably since I originally commented on this thread.
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I had hoped to use pfSense for the firewall when we moved into our new office space last summer, too, but the Pentium III box I had handy to install the firewall on wouldn't boot either 1.01 or the 1.2 beta, or anything else with a FreeBSD kernel. I never did find out why. Fortunately, it boots OpenBSD just fine, so at least I still get pf, even without the web interface and the additional features I like in pfSense.
You should retry with the upcoming 1.3 release which will be based on freebsd 7. Also make sure your bios is up2date and maybe exchange the cdrom. freebsd is sometimes picky about cdroms.
I already tried with a FreeBSD 7 release candidate CD, and again with RELEASE. Those won't boot either. (Neither will 6.2 or Dragonfly, and neither will a hard drive with pfSense installed on it and moved from another box.)
If I were ever to replace that firewall with a different machine, I would try pfSense again. It's been outstanding in our data center cabinet. But for now, the OpenBSD installation we have is working fine.
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Just for the record, which PIII hardware is that? Motherboard and chipset mf'rer?
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My setup providing Internet for about 500 people policy based load balancing on 8 x 8/2mbit ADSLs. I left out a lot of details about equipments for the ADSLs, the LAN and layer-2 failover.
| A1 |A2 |A3 |A4 |A5 |A6 |A7 |A8
| | | | | | | |
* VLAN Switch *
| |
****************** sync *******************- PFSense 1.2 * - - - - - - * PFSense 1.2 *
****************** *******************
\ /
*******************
* VLAN Switch *
*******************
/
******************* sync ******************* - PFSense 1.2 * - - - - - - * PFSense 1.2 *
******************* *******************
\ /
*******************
* VLAN Switch * –----------- DMZ (Through the firewall setup)
*******************
|
500 people LAN
./Thomas
- PFSense 1.2 * - - - - - - * PFSense 1.2 *
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Just for the record, which PIII hardware is that? Motherboard and chipset mf'rer?
Looks like it's not a PIII, it's a Duron. According to dmidecode, the motherboard is an Asus A7N8X2.0 with Phoenix BIOS dated 2003-03-19.
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…and with an nVidia nForce2 chipset.
The nve(4) driver supports the NVIDIA MCP onboard adapters of mainboards with the following chipsets:
* nForce
* nForce2
* nForce3
* nForce4So I guess the chipset should be supported. The AMD Duron is in this list as well. Hm…
What about your BIOS settings? Have you tried to disable ACPI / flash latest firmware etc.?
Found this from a quick google search: http://marc.info/?l=freebsd-questions&m=111719084502712&w=2
Try disabling firewire in the bios.
I had the same problem with my system (A7N8X). Worked until 4.9 then
stopped working.Disabling firewire allowed me to boot.
Thanks for the tip on disabling firewire to get this board to work.
Do you have the sata raid going as well?Never tried it.
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qdk
why do you have 2 sets of failover pairs of firewalls?
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@sai:
qdk
why do you have 2 sets of failover pairs of firewalls?
Just to keep it simple… The first layer of firewalls isnt needed when decent Internet is provided like a 100mbit fiber terminated in ethernet. futhermore there are some limits with captive portal and didnt go well with the policy based routing.
./Thomas
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So its been a little over a year since this thread began, I figure there's got to be some new stories out there. Since I started this thread, I've deployed 4 more PFS's, and working on my 5th tonight. I've been following the same template as I outlined earlier, VIA EPIA LN 10000EG mini-ITX boards running of CF's. Though I did have my first CF failure (I've been running them in x86 mode rather than embedded. Fortunately, solid state drives have come down in price enough now that I was able to replace that CF with a 32 GB SSD. The nice thing is however, that when a CF fails, the vast majority of the data is still intact and accessible, so I was able to pull the XML file off the old CF, and put it on a brand new install on the new SSD. Only picture I have, I took with my cellphone.
The box I'm installing tomorrow is just an Alix board, will be used as a remote IPsec gateway….actually connecting to the PFS box in the above picture as luck would have it.
So....any new stories out there? Is FoxNews guy still lurking about? Its always interesting to see what others have done/are doing with this stuff!!
-M@
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Currently we are pushing 500Mbit+ through firewalls built up of Intel DG965SS desktop boards, Intel Pro 1000s and 4GB ram with v1.2.2. The ram usage is fine but at about 500Mbit the cpu is in the red at 90%+. We are currently looking at upgrading the hardware with the least expensive solution as possible that will allow us to saturate 1Gbit traffic. We love PFsense and really want to donate money and will as soon as a couple of our projects take off a bit. I feel awful about not having anything sizable to give at the moment because this software really is wonderful. Its amazing how tight money is these days.
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Nice :) What CPU are you using in that Intel board?
-M@
