HW for school

Gulkings

Hey Guys,

I am trying to size a PFsense box for a school.
There are about 100 students on the school, internet is a 20/20MBit sync. fiber.
We need to run squid and squidguard in order to lower inbound traffic and control access to certain sites.
There will be 2 vlans - one that runs wlan(not from the PF) for the students and one that runs wlan and all administrative clients for non-students.
I have been looking at the Dell R210II with the following config:

PowerEdge R210 II Chassis, 3.5" Cabled HDDs, LED Diagnostics
2GB Memory, DDR3, 1333MHz (1x2GB Single Ranked LV UDIMM)
Intel Pentium G620, 2C/2T, 2.60GHz, 3M Cache, 65W TDP, DDR3-1066MHz
C1 2HD - No RAID with On-board SATA Controller, Requires 1-2 SATA HDDs
500GB, SATA, 3.5-in, 7.2K RPM Hard Drive (Cabled)

Would the above config be suitable for the school?
The PFSense would be installed directly on the hardware/HDD.

TIA,

Gulkings

stephenw10

Some good info on that system here: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,37682.msg194550.html#msg194550

What NICs would you be using?

Steve

lint

I have been really impressed with Dell for the past few years. They have created low cost, low end servers that work great for education.

One thing to consider about that server is that it only has 2 NICs on the default customization. I would definitely add on the additional NICs, or purchase a card separately. It is nice to have them in case you decide to have a second internet connection, expand, etc.

Squid and Squidguard will work fine. You will want to create and keep reports with SARG as well.

I hope everything goes well!

Nachtfalke

Hi,

you should think about more than 2GB of RAM. Squid is using RAM caching, for indexing HDD cache and so on. Chose lower HDD (60GB is enough) and use 4GB or more of RAM.

Just for your information:
I have got 4GB system memory
I am using 30GB od Hard Disk Cache for squid
I am using 1GB of memory cache for squid.
I am using squidguard

And my overall RAM usage is always more than 75%

I am using this CPU:
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5506 @ 2.13GHz

I have got 2x 16MBit/s down and 2x 1MBit/s up.
CPU usage is in general lower than 5%. Sometimes it growths up to 10% or 15%.