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    State of MBT-2220/MBT-4220?

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Official Netgate® Hardware
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    • G
      goodthings
      last edited by

      Interesting.
      Do you happen to know if any European distributor sells the MBT-4220 or are these generally only sold directly by Netgate?

      jimpJ 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • jimpJ
        jimp Rebel Alliance Developer Netgate @goodthings
        last edited by

        @goodthings said in State of MBT-2220/MBT-4220?:

        Interesting.
        Do you happen to know if any European distributor sells the MBT-4220 or are these generally only sold directly by Netgate?

        Not off the top of my head, but if you ask sales@netgate.com they would be able to tell you for sure.

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        • B
          bcruze
          last edited by

          i replaced a sg2220 with a mbt-4220 and the switch over took all of maybe 15 minutes

          you will be very happy with your purchase. i am

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          • B
            bplein
            last edited by bplein

            I bought an MBT-4220 a couple of weeks ago, and am about to replace my DIY atom-based pfSense router with it today.

            I did have some stability problems but I think it may have been due to imported settings from my other system that weren't compatible. If I do a base install of pfSense and just use it like that (I put my work laptop behind it for a business day), it's stable. But just today while writing up this response, after importing my settings from another system, it locked up on me again.

            Is there a "best practice" list of settings such as thermal/crypto settings, powerd, any tunables, etc. for this specific board? It appears that the following work fine (but I haven't A/B tested anything yet):

            • AES-NI CPU-based Acceleration
            • Intel Core CPU on-die thermal sensor
            • Enable PowerD, Hiadaptive
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            • B
              bcruze
              last edited by

              i have aes enabled.

              temp die enabled. with the fan unplugged. it stays around 56c

              mine is on adaptive and stays around 6-700Mghz and runs 2 openvpn tunnels with no issues

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              • B
                bplein @bcruze
                last edited by

                @bcruze I was seeing higher temps with the fan unplugged, so I sourced a 35x35x20mm heat sink, search for LPD35-20B by Alpha Co. It works great.

                In fact I got a lot of 10 on eBay cheaper than I could find one shipped anywhere else. Seller wanted $12 plus $6 shipping, I used the “make offer” function and offered $11 total shipped and he accepted.

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                • B
                  bcruze @bplein
                  last edited by

                  @bplein

                  if at anything above adaptive mine did go up about 10 degrees

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                  • B
                    bplein @bcruze
                    last edited by

                    @bcruze Yes, I had mine on Highadaptive. I tested with the fan unplugged (stock heatsink) by loading up the processor, one core at a time, and wasn't comfortable with it going up into the 70C+ range. With this 20mm tall elliptical fin heat sink (with the case sitting on its side with rubber feet attached) the temps are quite sane.

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                    • B
                      bplein
                      last edited by bplein

                      Looks like they dropped the price on the MBT-4220 by $100 (list) and $50 under the prior "sale" price. https://store.netgate.com/MBT-4220-system.aspx

                      So it looks like I overpaid by $50 for it. ☹ Maybe they can send me a consolation prize.

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                      • S
                        smnolde
                        last edited by

                        I've recently purchased and configured from scratch my first pfSense box using the MBT-4220. It's been running well for about a week now and I'll have a few weeks further to evaluate it and tweak it. This MBT-4220 is a great replacement for a quite old FreeBSD system I've not upgraded in years.

                        For home use this is more than adequate and meets my needs:

                        • DHCP pools and static mapping
                        • OpenSSH user shell
                        • OpenVPN connection for family mobile devices
                        • traffic mapping using ntopng
                          *Queing
                          *Squid/squidguard

                        Many of these things I configured by hand in the past but now have everything in a nice little box. Wifi access is provided by a separate wifi router.

                        I've read about replacing the fan with a heat sink so I'm investigating that as a possible upgrade.

                        For home the cpu runs 4-10% depending on activity and ntopng. Load averages are about 0.24 with a video stream running. Temperature with the fan is about 38-40°C.

                        Configuring OpenVPN for my family's phones and PCs is pretty simple. It's been good to add squidguard on the OpenVPN interfaces so I can filter out the trackers and ads (and other unwanted content).

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