Overkill?
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I'm setting up a network using pfsense and I want to know if my rig that I want to use is overkill and if I should use it as a fileserver instead and get something a little lower on the scale to use with pfsense.
DELL POWEREDGE 2550 SERVER
Dual P3 1133MHZ 2 Gig MEMORYI have a home office and what my plans are is to have the one box host three networks.
1. Home Trusted (Home Broadband Connected to It)
2. Home WiFi (Home Broadband Connected to It)
3. Home Business (Business Broadband Connected to It)On the business end there will be a Poweredge 6550 hosting webpages and streaming media on the net.
Also is it necessary to have this all as gigabit network or will a standard 10/100 do fine?
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The most important points in determining a suitable hardware size is the internet connection speed that it's supposed to handle as well as IPsec tunnels since the CPU has to do the number crunching for encryption.
Gigabit LAN might be fine when uploading large amounts of (usually big) media files to your local server.
W-LAN typically is 54/108 MBit currently, so I don't see the need for gigabit here.If you want good, reliable throughput then go for Intel Server NICs. They cost more but offload the CPU way better than others.
From what I think your network will look like I'd say you can go with smaller hardware for pfSense, but maybe you got a really big pipe to the internet… ;D
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I dont have crazy internet speed, just the small business package from comcast . I do intend, like most businesses, growing so I do want to make sure i'm slightly future proof.
Those intel nics are a bit pricey but from what I've read they can be a Godsend. I'll definitely put them on the priority list.
I also agree that I probably should go with some smaller hardware. Any recommendations for my network size? Got about 8 computers all together plus a webserver and a soon-to-be fileserver.
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Our new webpage hase some nice info about hardware sizing. Check it out at http://www.pfsense.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=52&Itemid=49 .
