Supermicro Atom box
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I need to replace my firewall at the co-lo. The switch that feeds my existing pfsense box shorted out and took the box with it. I am considering buying one of these to replace it:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816101364It has the D525 dual core atom and will have 4G of DDR3 ram and a decent HDD.
I have a 100M connection and it usually sits at about 18-20M with 60M bursts during the day. I have 24 Windoze servers (all with static public IPs) hiding behind pfsense in transparent bridge mode (release 1.2.3). There is no NAT, no VPN, no DHCP, just some WAN rules to keep the unwanted crap out. I have experimented with SNORT but it isn't a necessity. Based on the hardware sizing chart this server should be ok. In reality can anyone here tell me if they think it will be ok before I buy it?
Thanks
Bob
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Dear Bob76535,
It should be ok, my box also run the same chassis and atom board (2G ram) with 100M connection. We use the transparent mode with snort packages. Average traffic is 30-40M and burst to 60M in the peak hours. With the luck in the past 20 months, we do not have issues on the traffic issues (1.2.3RC3). We now plan to switch to (2.0 RC3).
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If you are planning to increase that WAN connection from 100Mb and adding packages like snort or squid sometime in near future than I would recommend you have a second look at i3 CPUs. Atoms are powerful enough for decent throughput but handling routing for large number of users with increased bandwidth might just be a bit too much for it. Plus the max you can go on Atoms for now is 4GB RAM. It sounds a lot for now but as technology is changing rapidly 4GB might just be a low end config mid next year.. who knows.. just guessing.