Hardware solution for 4 WAN Load Balanced home network?
-
Hello everyone,
I've spent a couple of hours reading through most of the threads in hardware and I'm even more confused than when I started.
I have 4 WAN connections to my house, each of them are 100/100 fibre. (Before anyone asks, I got them free due to lucky circumstances, otherwise I wouldn't pay for them)
The WAN connections are load balanced using a (ridiculous setup of) pfsense installed on a i7 3612QM/4GB RAM laptop (one arm router) + VLANs on a 24 port managed Gb switch.The laptop NIC is of course a Realtek. It manages to keep up for casual traffic, but once I have a few devices downloading stuff, it starts throwing "watchdog timeout" errors. Similarly, when I install additional packages (squid, ntopng, etc.), the same errors start again.
It seems to be a matter of NIC, as the CPU hovers around 25% most of the time (haven't checked the load when using OpenVPN).
So, I'm looking for a reliable solution to replace the current setup without costing the earth. I would prefer to remove the managed switch from the WAN equation if possible (running out of ports on it) and find a 5+ NIC solution.
I looked at the SG-4860 and:
- the CPU seems to be much lower than my current laptop, so I'm not sure how it would cope;
- even if it does, the price is almost double my budget once shipping to Australia is added (local distributors are even more expensive)
Can anyone offer any alternative hardware suggestions (preferably under $400)
Many Thanks!
-
US$ 400?
Buy a QM77 board, use the CPU and RAM from your laptop and get a nice case+psu
-
That's a brilliant idea.
I got really exited, only to discover that the laptop CPU is not removable…
-
Laptop maker/model?Sorry about that, there is a FCBGA1224 version of that CPU.