Intel core 2 or i5+ssd and several 1TB drives?
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Hi all.
It's my first post and I'm looking at rolling out a new network over the next three weeks.
Where do I start?
My backhaul is very slow and I am starting the network with 10 users hoping to grow over several months to 50 users maybe more.
I will be using pfsense as my firewall and open mesh nodes with coova for billing.
I am contemplating on attempting to cache everything that my users browse to firstly speed up the network and secondly lower my ISP expenditure by throttling back on bandwidth oh, hopefully tricking my clients into thinking that they have a more powerful ISP than what is really able to supply.
My instal of pfsense would include squid and I am looking into http://cachevideos.com/. I don't know if this is a scam or really works. They want a minimum of $150 to buy for one server. Oh I don't mind expanding my hard drives each months to cater for everything that has been cached!!
So my question is…
Should I get the best motherboard, processor and a ssd drive for the initial pfsense and plugins then add several large capacity hdd?
How much memory do you think would be use full?
How do I add to the pfsense hardware setup a couple of months down the line when Ineed to add more hard drives?
Many thanks forsaking the time to read this and any help grately appreciated.
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I am contemplating on attempting to cache everything that my users browse to firstly speed up the network and secondly lower my ISP expenditure by throttling back on bandwidth oh, hopefully tricking my clients into thinking that they have a more powerful ISP than what is really able to supply.
Caching is great, but it's not a cure-all. Some pages and objects don't cache. Not all your customers will be looking at the same stuff, so many (most) page requests will be cache misses. Nevertheless, it does help, particularly on update Tuesday if you have squid configured to cache Windows updates (this doesn't happen automatically, but it's easy to set up if you google it).
I am looking into http://cachevideos.com/.
I'm not familiar with that one, but I believe there is a cost-free way to cache youtube using a combination of squid and some downloadable package. This too is trivial to find with your favourite search engine.
Should I get the best motherboard, processor and a ssd drive for the initial pfsense and plugins then add several large capacity hdd?
Consider the following facts.
1. squid requires RAM as well as HDD capacity. It is generally recommended that you set your squid RAM/HDD caches in a ratio of 1/10.
2. It is generally recommended that you dedicate not more than 50% of your system RAM to squid cache.
3. pfsense 32-bit will not utilize more than 3GB of system RAM.
So if you're using a 32-bit version of pfsense with squid, you will have at most 3GB of system RAM, and if you follow recommended settings, you will have at most 1.5GB of RAM cache and 150GB of HDD cache. Don't get to crazy buying hard drives just yet.
Ok, so if you really want more cache, you could hypothetically go with a 64-bit install of pfsense, but now consider this.
1. 64-bit installs are available only on version 2.0beta of pfsense. It's pretty good, but there are still issues.
2. Speaking of issues, squid will currently not run on pfsense 2.0. I'm sure that will soon be fixed, but right now it's broken.
As of right now, the only way you're realistically going to run squid on pfsense is with 150GB of disk cache or less. That may change in the future.
How do I add to the pfsense hardware setup a couple of months down the line when Ineed to add more hard drives?
A good start would be to edit /etc/fstab to have /var/squid mount on a separate device. Then you could replace this device (ie, a separate hard drive or RAID volume) in the future without interrupting your pfsense install (other than shutting it down, if you don't have hot-swap drives). You could even use NFS or something similar and have your squid cache hosted on another machine.
One more thing: with 10 users, even up to 50, I expect a hard drive would perform well, but for more users, and for increased realiability and reduced noise and power consumption I would recommend considering an SSD. The biggest benefit here with many users is the superior random read and write performance of an SSD. While most hard drives top out at around 1MB/s @4k reads and writes, a $240 120GB Vertex 2 will do something like 50MB/s or more. I don't know what kind of bandwidth you'll have available to your clients on the LAN side, but with squid set up and properly tuned, your hdd activity will certainly involve a lot of random seeks.
That said, I've never been able to push more than about 200mbps (20MB/s) with squid, so don't bother going too high-end. Most modern SSDs would do well, I think.