Thinking about Going pfSense
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So.. I have been through numerous Consumer off the shelf wireless routers. Either get one problem or another. Mostly reliability and needing a reboot sort of thing. I hardly use the wireless portion of any main router due to an access point where most clients connect to. At any giving time theres at least 20 devices connected. and about 8 or so in use. (This is a Home network) How Reliable would it be to run this on an Dell Inspiron 531? I`ll be using a Intel Pro 10/100/1000 Server PCI NIC to go out to the LAN Side and the Internal 10/100 port for the WAN side. It has an AMD Sempron LE-1300 CPU at 2.3Ghz which I guess is plenty enough.
My Connection: Cable 25/2 Will be using ONLY upload QoS just to throttle upload speed down to 1.8 to keep the Ping low.
I`m just tired of these crap consumer routers. Sad part is this $21 Rosewill Wireless router (tp-link rebrand) has done better so far than my $100 Netgear.
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well… once you go pfsense you never go back..
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After a couple of years of DD-WRT and even buying a Buffalo Router with DD-WRT pre-installed to try and make it stable I switched to of sense over a year ago and it is fantastic. I have now upgraded to dedicated hardware of a fabless atom board and it is rock solid. Just do it, you won't regret it.
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That hardware will have no problems at all with a 25/2 connection. However at that lower speed you could be using something more efficient or something fanless. A system with no moving parts is likely to be reliable in the long term than a standard desktop.
Steve
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I have not really looked into it that much but how well does the Caching work? I know smoothwall has it but does pfSense have it? Does Caching really work well?
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I assume you mean web (http) caching, Squid. It's available as a package for pfSense.
It depends what you're using it for. In terms of caching common files locally to save WAN bandwidth I would say it's only really worth it if you've got quite a few lan side clients. It works well enough for filtering if you add Squidguard or Dansguardian.Steve
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I second a fanless solution, something like an alix board etc.. You'll go from ~60watts to ~10watts. Spec wise you'll just want 1-2gb of ram unless you want a crap ton of firewall rules / snort rules or something of that nature.