New Install - I would appreciate any advice
-
Hi, I am fairly new to pfSense, bsd and advanced networking in general. I am about to undertake on a persoanl project that I would like some opinions on 1)hardware and 2)setup (ie. single instance of pfs or multiple instances).
The setup will be as follows:
Multiwan setup (100mg cable, and 24 mg adsl) -I need loadbalancing and failover protection for my serves
nic for Lan with 15-20 vlans
nic for asterisk server andabout 20 phones
nic for servers (www,zoneminder,bigbluebutton…)The box will also have to tunel vpn connections to 2 posibbly 3 or 4 remote locations (site-to-site)
I will be sticking with intel nic's but need help in determining wether I should get 10/100's or 1g nic's
Also cpu and ram requirements.Any advice or recomendations would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
-
Intel is good, but gigabit might be safer even if you don't need it.
See here: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,21670.msg111440.html
-
If you want to use the full capacity of Gigabit NICs don't get PCI versions unless they are 64-bit PCI running at 66MHz or more in an equally capable slot. Reason: ONE Gigabit NIC can require more bus bandwidth than is available on a standard PCI bus.
-
If you want to use the full capacity of Gigabit NICs don't get PCI versions unless they are 64-bit PCI running at 66MHz or more in an equally capable slot. Reason: ONE Gigabit NIC can require more bus bandwidth than is available on a standard PCI bus.
Ehh…while technically correct, it doesn't matter. Compatibility is more important than speed. Its not like anyone needs to push gigabit to the Internet at home. I'd rather have a well supported gigabit adapter than a crappy Realtek 10/100 adapter, even if my speeds were only 2Mb. Latency, packet loss, UDP streaming reliability, etc are far more important than the speed difference.
-
Valnar: I agree the Gigabit adapters won't be be pushed to anything like line speed if all the traffic is between LAN and WAN. BUT there is nothing in the description that says there won't be traffic routed between those 15-20 VLANs on the LAN interface nor does the description say there won't be traffic routed between LAN and those servers on one of the other NICs.
There might not be any advantage in those Intel gigabit adapters if the system behaves wierdly because the Gigabit NICs saturate the PCI bus for extended periods.