Hardware check

rmm

Hi,

Building a new firewall and I want to run the hardware by you folks to make sure it'll handle my requirements.

There will be dual 1G WANs, a 1G LAN, and a 100M WAN for out of band access. Minimal firewall rules, no NAT or IPsec. We run unbound and ntpd but no other services. We may start running snort though.

Looking at the following hardware:

Intel Core i5-3470 Ivy Bridge Quad-Core 3.2GHz
SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCI-LN4F-O LGA 1155 Intel C204 ATX Intel Xeon E3 Server Motherboard (4 x Intel 82574L NICs)
8 G RAM
SYBA SD-ADA50024 2.5" SATA/USB To Compact Flash Adapter
SanDisk Extreme SDCFX-008G-X46 8 GB compact flash

Mainly wanted to check that a quad i3 is sufficient, and that the Intel 82574L NICs will work well.

Thanks in advance!

stephenw10

When you say 2x 1G wans do you actually mean 1Gbps connections or just Gigabit nics?

Steve

@rmm:

Hi,

Building a new firewall and I want to run the hardware by you folks to make sure it'll handle my requirements.

There will be dual 1G WANs, a 1G LAN, and a 100M WAN for out of band access. Minimal firewall rules, no NAT or IPsec. We run unbound and ntpd but no other services. We may start running snort though.

Looking at the following hardware:

Intel Core i5-3470 Ivy Bridge Quad-Core 3.2GHz

SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCI-LN4F-O LGA 1155 Intel C204 ATX Intel Xeon E3 Server Motherboard (4 x Intel 82574L NICs)

8 G RAM

SYBA SD-ADA50024 2.5" SATA/USB To Compact Flash Adapter

SanDisk Extreme SDCFX-008G-X46 8 GB compact flash

Mainly wanted to check that a quad i3 is sufficient, and that the Intel 82574L NICs will work well.

Thanks in advance!

Will be fine, even when running snort/suricata. NICs are supported. You could have went for a dual core cpu if your only intention is to run stock pfsense, since the current version of pf is single threaded. That's going to change with the next version though, which is just around the corner. Getting a quad core future proofs your setup. And also allows you to fully utilize snort/suricata on all your WANs. Only thing I would change is the storage. Get something bigger (in the 80GB range) if you intend to log/capture everything, including the kitchen sink.