Hardware recommendations ATT 1gig up and down
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Well the pc I was looking at acquiring is not available to me any longer. I’ll keep an eye out for something cheap but functional that’ll support AES-NI.
I have an old Compaq with a Core 2 Duo E8600 in it I’m going to start with once the NIC gets here. It’ll give me a chance to play with and learn Pfsense while hunting a pc or parts.
It’ll have 8gb ram and I’ll use that 16gb ssd as the hd. It should be enough for me to familiarize myself a bit with Pfsense.
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Well the pc I was looking at acquiring is not available to me any longer. I’ll keep an eye out for something cheap but functional that’ll support AES-NI.
I have an old Compaq with a Core 2 Duo E8600 in it I’m going to start with once the NIC gets here. It’ll give me a chance to play with and learn Pfsense while hunting a pc or parts.
It’ll have 8gb ram and I’ll use that 16gb ssd as the hd. It should be enough for me to familiarize myself a bit with Pfsense.
Keep us posted.
I got myself a i340-T4 as well for the same price as that of T2 (at least when I was looking). Now I have my RAM and motherboard (AsRock J3355B) on order.
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Well the pc I was looking at acquiring is not available to me any longer. I’ll keep an eye out for something cheap but functional that’ll support AES-NI.
I have an old Compaq with a Core 2 Duo E8600 in it I’m going to start with once the NIC gets here. It’ll give me a chance to play with and learn Pfsense while hunting a pc or parts.
It’ll have 8gb ram and I’ll use that 16gb ssd as the hd. It should be enough for me to familiarize myself a bit with Pfsense.
Keep us posted.
I got myself a i340-T4 as well for the same price as that of T2 (at least when I was looking). Now I have my RAM and motherboard (AsRock J3355B) on order.
Glad you found a t4 for the same price. Makes it easy on which to buy. My nic should be here Saturday so I hope to start this weekend.
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This is not going as I’d hoped.
The old pic I was going to use to toy with doesn’t have a slot to accommodate the i390-t4. So I decided to use my main pc (amd fx8320e) and just disconnect all the hard drives and use an usb drive to just try out pfsense.
Install went fine. But I can not connect to the web GUI no matter what. Tried from two other computers. Tried reinstalling pfsense from scratch - twice. Tried with leaving the wan cable unplugged when installing. No luck. I can’t even ping the pfsense machine.
I’m lost and confused. Time for a break and see if I can find where I making a mistake.
Good luck inxisble. I hope your build goes well.
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This is not going as I’d hoped.
The old pic I was going to use to toy with doesn’t have a slot to accommodate the i390-t4. So I decided to use my main pc (amd fx8320e) and just disconnect all the hard drives and use an usb drive to just try out pfsense.
Install went fine. But I can not connect to the web GUI no matter what. Tried from two other computers. Tried reinstalling pfsense from scratch - twice. Tried with leaving the wan cable unplugged when installing. No luck. I can’t even ping the pfsense machine.
I’m lost and confused. Time for a break and see if I can find where I making a mistake.
Good luck inxisble. I hope your build goes well.
Not great luck here either.
Got the J3355B board and RAM… tested well. No errors in memtest+. But once I connect the NIC and restart, I get the AsRock splash screen and then the motherboard shuts down. I might have to RMA the NIC back to Ebay :(
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Update
Found an old hard drive and used that, coupled with a single port intel nic I got off eBay. Finally got it up and running to play with. The computer has an e7600 core2duo in it.
I did manage to snag a Compaq 6200 pro mt w i5-2400 in it relatively waiting for it to come in.
Next problem is when using the old pc, my speed when connected to Pia are way lower than expected.
Laptop through pfsense gets 400/400 off my gigabit line. Once I turn on PIA, it drops to 50-90/90, down/up.
Changing the port to dmz+ on the 5268ac did nothing to change the speeds. I made sure to reboot the router and pfsense computer.
Hoping it’s an issue with the e7600 not using aes-ni. The onboard nic in the pc is supposed to be intel. New pc is supposed to come in tomorrow. Should have it up and running in an hour if it does.
Here’s hoping for better luck.
Better luck to you to Inxsible
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What throughput are you expecting to see over OpenVPN?
400Mbps is fast for OpenVPN using a single connection. Also many providers will not reach that speed, though I believe I've seen reports PIA will.
Steve
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The 400 was with openvpn not setup yet. I was just testing connectivity.
New pc came in yesterday. I can’t get the i340-t4 to work. But I got it all running with the single port nic I picked up.
900+ up and down just testing connectivity. Once OpenVpn was setup for PIA, I got 300-400 down, 250-300 up. That’s with pfsense not set on my 5268ac to DMZ+ To completely bypass the gateway.
That’s faster than I’ve ever been able to get at night with any device in my house for PIA. I’m quite happy with that. I realize I could probably get faster using the DMZ+ function to completely remove my 5268ac gateway from the equation, but I want to make sure I don’t leave the other things using the gateway exposed to the web.
Next, I wouldn’t mind figuring out how to add wireless internet access through pfsense now. The pc doesn’t have any wireless adapter that I setup pfsense on. Reading up on if it’s possible and what would be required to make it work.
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It's almost always better to use an external access point of some sort. You can usually position it better and you can get whatever the latest greatest wifi technology is. With a wifi device in pfSense you can only use 802.11N.
Steve
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Thanks Steve.
Is there one that’s recommended?
I have a Netgear R7000 I could try to use if that would work. Never could get it setup the way I wanted. That’s running did-wrt. I can put the firmware to stock too.
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I have a Netgear R7000 I could try to use if that would work.
Why wouldn't it work? what's wrong with it?
Never could get it setup the way I wanted.
Which is?
If this R7000 has a WAN port, the easiest way to set it up is in bridge mode (no NAT) and simplest to integrated into a LAN with a dedicated FW.
Buy I agree with him, have your WIFI in a separate box because your FW will tend to be in a corner closet, while the WIFI antenna most likely needs to be centrally located, in between other advantages as already mentioned.
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Yup, should work fine. I imagine DD-WRT gives you some more options over the default firmware including 'access point only mode' or something similar.
Even if it doesn't you can just disable DHCP on it and connect to it's LAN ports.
https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Use_an_existing_wireless_router_with_pfSense
Steve
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run ddwrt on the r7000, add a laptop cooler to power off the usb port, as use it as a AP
let the pc do pfsense
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I have a Netgear R7000 I could try to use if that would work.
Why wouldn't it work? what's wrong with it?
Never could get it setup the way I wanted.
Which is?
If this R7000 has a WAN port, the easiest way to set it up is in bridge mode (no NAT) and simplest to integrated into a LAN with a dedicated FW.
Buy I agree with him, have your WIFI in a separate box because your FW will tend to be in a corner closet, while the WIFI antenna most likely needs to be centrally located, in between other advantages as already mentioned.
I could never get it to work correctly connecting to PIA through my gateway. Even if it said it was connected to PIA, none of the computers connected to the r7000 showed being on the vpn. Other times, it would drop the connect and never let me re-establish it without a complete reboot of TE router. That reset all of the setting for PIA.
Left alone without PIA, it worked fine.
I gave up on it for a while. That let me to pfsense, which I love.
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Thanks fo the info on using the r7000. I’ll work on that this coming weekend.