How Far Have You Scaled Your PFS Box?
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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@
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1.86GHZ E6300
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Just starting out with PFsense.
First deployment was in a VM on my server (i know a dedicated box would be better but i cant afford to co-lo a 2nd box just for the firewall), now it's sitting between the other VM's and the internet also doing a bit of routing quite nicely.
Second was on a Dell gx240 at home, to load balance my DSL lines.
Replaced the Dell with a Alix 2D3 (my DSL lines come into my livingroom atm, so the noise from the dell got on my nerves) and just upgraded it to 2.23-prerelease since 2.22 seemed to crash/reboot itself a couple times wanted to see if was a problem specific to 6.22
The box on the VM has a 100Mbit connection, although most of the time isn't pushing more a 1 - 2Mbit/s
Alix is working as Firewall/Nat Router and Loadbalancer
I sometimes use the inbuilt PPTP server to remote in when on HSDPA although that's speed limited by the DSL. (Vpn is only setup for wan1)DSL lines are synched at ~24Mbit on the downstream and ~2.5Mbit on the upstream taking overheads into account with Pfsense doing the load balancing it allows me to pull about 40Mbit/s of actuall IP throughput in the downstream direction and 4Mbit/s in the upstream direction.
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We have pfsense running on a dell pwoeredge server with a 2.4ghz xeon processor and I think 2 gig ram.
We have a 100/100 connection and with snort monitoring traffice we are getting 58/48 through the firewall/router. which is actually pretty decent. with snort off we get about 90/60
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Update:
We have an Intel SR1520ML server that we are testing. This thing has 2 separate servers in it. Each side we have a 2.4Ghz quad core cpu and 4GB DDR2-800 memory with the x83ML boards. With the onboard nics that it comes with, the thing will saturate 1GB. Right now we are pushing it over 750MBit pretty consistently. The cpu isn't even hitting 45%.
I have attached a pic for the non believers ;)
