Is pfSense right for me?
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Background: I am an intermediate Linux administrators. Web, FTP, email and DNS servers are no big deal to me. Routing, I'm not super keen on but I can learn.
I am in the position of needing a new router- the little Belkin my wife had before we were married is swamped. I work from home, using VOIP heavily on my own workstation, plus we have 1 or two netflix type streams going at a time, plus my son games. All in all, we need a new router. I'm looking at the Asus RT-N16 as being sufficient. I'm also a terrible cheapskate. We're putting 3gb ram in a dual core AMD box we have laying around and using it as a game server, saving $200/yr on a VPS after accounting for power etc. I thought "why not extend that savings and just add a second nic to the game server box and run a router on that instead." I don't really need wifi at the moment, and I could always press the Belkin into service for that if I really really needed it.
So, with a ram hungry game server running on 2.5GB ram (Minecraft) and the pfsense firewall etc running, will it have the horsepower needed? Is there anything that I'm not considering here? What I'm looking for is a solution that I don't have to tweak constantly. Other than making sure the hardware is running fine, I don't want to have to maintain it. Would I just be better off with the Asus router with TomatoUSB on it? Thanks for the suggestions and input on this.
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I'd never run a gaming server and a firewall on the same OS, game servers are magnets for abuse and you don't want your firewall getting owned if your gaming server is owned. But if you can run ESX or another hypervisor of your preference on it, and run the firewall as a VM and the game server as a separate VM, that's a reasonable solution. That'll get you better performance, scalability and flexibility than a consumer grade router.
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Thank you! Sounds to me like its more trouble than I want to go to, and more complex than I have time for to be honest. That was a nice definitive answer and I greatly appreciate it.