Hardware requirement for Intel home router

SteveITS

I'm not familiar with OpenWRT or Yamon, but if you're looking for traffic monitoring we've used bandwidthd. It's listed at https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/monitoring/graphs/bandwidth-usage.html but not https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/packages/list.html. There are others as well.

Bandwidthd has a formatting (iframe size) problem with pfSense 2.4.5 but other than that it seems fine for our needs. Click the "click to remove frame" link to get around that for now.

stephenw10

The C3558 CPU in the XG-7100 is a complete SoC that includes the 4 ixgbe NICs. They are not bus connected in the traditional sense.

The quoted 2.5Gbps internal link is not a PCIe bandwidth. It's the Ethernet connection between the NICs and the on-board switch chip. Base-KX there because the chips are linked directly rather then using fibre or cat6 etc. Better explanation here:
https://etherealmind.com/backplane-ethernet-gbase-kr-kx/

Steve

Hikari

@teamits tnx! I just created a thread asking for that lol

@stephenw10 said in Hardware requirement for Intel home router:

The C3558 CPU in the XG-7100 is a complete SoC that includes the 4 ixgbe NICs. They are not bus connected in the traditional sense.
The quoted 2.5Gbps internal link is not a PCIe bandwidth. It's the Ethernet connection between the NICs and the on-board switch chip. Base-KX there because the chips are linked directly rather then using fibre or cat6 etc. Better explanation here:
https://etherealmind.com/backplane-ethernet-gbase-kr-kx/

tnx a lot for all the help!

Indeed I was wrong. I verified Intel spec for Atom C3558 and I210-AT, and indeed 4 ports are provided directly by the CPU. I believe I210-AT uses 3GIO 2.1, as that's its supported bus and C3558 supports 3.0 and seems to be a Comet Lake.

NollipfSense

@Hikari All I can say is that XG-7100 makes me drool ... if you can afford it don't hesitate.

Hikari

@NollipfSense said in Hardware requirement for Intel home router:

@Hikari All I can say is that XG-7100 makes me drool ... if you can afford it don't hesitate.

lol why is it that much?

Isn't it as a mini-PC with a weak CPU and some very good RAM amount and reasonable storage? What's the advantage of an appliance for a built PC for a user that knows how to install pfSense?

Hikari

Does SG-5100 have only 8GB for storage? How much comes free for installing extra pfSense packages?

stephenw10

The packages themselves don't require much drive space. It's the logging and anything that caches that does.
This is a test SG-5100 I have here running from eMMC with Suricata installed:

Disk usage:
     / 	      23% of 6.7GiB - ufs

Steve

Hikari

Tnx a lot! Is it possible to use flash card on it? I missed that out.

Is there an specific model or limit?

SteveITS

https://www.netgate.com/solutions/pfsense/sg-5100.html shows
"8GB eMMC Flash on board
Upgradable"

I think you are looking for https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/solutions/sg-5100/m-2-sata-installation.html.

The only time I've ever seen a pfSense router get into space issues was one where Suricata had a bug for a while where the log files were not correctly being deleted in the default configuration, and slowly grew to 6 GB or so. Otherwise for most normal use I would expect to see in the 1-3 GB usage and if it was over 2 I'd be a bit surprised unless there was really heavy package use or squid caching or something going on.

stephenw10

Yup you can install an m.2 SATA drive (not NVMe) and run from that as shown there.

You might do that if you wanted to run Squid with a large local cache or use a lot of local logging for example.

Steve

Hikari

tnx!!

So it's not rly necessary. Anything not router related I run on my Ubuntu server.

So, SG-5100 does have enough storage, and SG-7100's extra SSD should be for running services that can/should be ran outside router. The same should be for extra RAM.

They both have same CPU, so I guess Atom is enough too.

So, basically SG-7100 is aimed at running average services not related to routing, and for LANs with many hundreds PCs?

stephenw10

Number of clients is not really a good measure for pfSense. You're very unlikely to hit the limits if the state table.
Total throughput and how much of that might need to be over VPN are what you should be considering.

Steve