Pfsense good appliance?
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we are looking for a good cheap pfsense appliance that can handle qos for our asterisk voip system. we have 18 phones and 18 computers. we do not have enough electricity or enough room for a computer to put pfsense on. The recommended vendors page isnt useful because the websites dont have anything for pfsense, or maybe i just dont understand the websites.
Help would be appreciated
Thank you -
I'm not personally aware of any pfSense-specific appliances that come with it preinstalled or anything (I think there's at least one company selling these though), but since it'll run on any x86 hardware, there are lots of options to build one yourself.
Probably the most popular options are the PC Engines ALIX series or the Soekris (buy the board, add a CF card, enclosure and power supply). An ALIX 2d2 or 6b2 is probably a good fit for you. Some resellers of this gear might install pfSense for you, but it's not difficult to do yourself if you have a CF->IDE adapter or a USB card reader.
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You can buy pre-installed pfSense devices from Netgate. As an added bonus, they are a supporter of the pfSense project.
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I've used m0n0wall on alix and soekris boards, and pfsense on soekris. I prefer the soekris hardware, but both are nice and compact, low power. If you get tired of asterisk you can install the freeswitch package on pfsense, like I did. The freeswitch package is well-supported and maturing rapidly. (The freeswitch software itself appears to be rock-solid. When I say the package is maturing rapidly, I'm referring to the GUI, which is heroicly maintained by mcrane.)
db