What are people using as there pfsense firewall/router?

mattlach

@bingo600 said in What are people using as there pfsense firewall/router?:

How did you implement the dual PSU stuff ?
Is that "magic" happening in the "black box" that the PicoPSU's are connected to ?

Yep, it happens in the "black box".

It is a consumer Phanteks product.

http://www.phanteks.com/PH-PWCOB.html

I bought it from Amazon here:
https://www.amazon.com/Phanteks-combine-Redundant-Function-PH-PWCOB_2P1M/dp/B01E9YMX4I/

It is unclear to me exactly what it does. It was marketed as a way for people to combine two consumer power supplies for higher output, but as long as you don't need to connect any devices (like drives, etc, which I didn't because mine uses an M.2 drive) it seems to work well as a redundancy solution.

Goes without saying, it is by no means "enterprise level validated" but it has worked really well for me. it was a nice way to get the firewall to take power from both of my PSU's for both servers, and thus stay up until the last one goes down, in case of an outage.

There are some negative reviews where people have melted or set the thing on fire, but from what I can tell, this is because they disregarded the max rating of the thing (1170W) and connected two big power supplies together.

mattlach

@bingo600 said in What are people using as there pfsense firewall/router?:

I like the Pico-PSU's , but prefer the "Red WI" (Wide input)

I hadnt heard of these "Red Wi" units before. I will have to look them up.

I'm guessing the big difference there is that they take the (typically) 19VDC laptop chargers, and pull that down to 12V instead of using a 12VDC AC adapter?

bingo600

@mattlach

See here
https://www.mini-box.com/DC-DC

caserojj

Last year I purchased two watchguard XTM 520 firewalls on ebay to use as my primary gateway and a backup firewall gateway for a new server rack in my home office. I also purchased two used Pentium Xeon cpu's as upgrades for it. I managed to install pfsense 2.4.4 community edition on them using some videos on youtube. They sat idle and unused in my server rack until my existing ZyWALL 310 firewall started to act all screwy on me. I purchased the ZyWALL three years ago for about $1000. It was more than I wanted to pay and I hated the software interface and the fact that I had to continue to fork out money for things that are already included in pfsense. That is the reason I decide to switch to pfsense in the first place.....cost was lower. So earlier this week the ZyWALL started to freeze up on me and I scrambled to pull one of the old watchguard xtm 520 from the new rack and put it into my old rack. For the record I work in software engineering from home and so my home office is my primary work place. I need reliable internet and reliable firewalling all the time. To complete my story I managed to upgrade the firmware on the ZyWALL 310 and stabilize it for now. But I vowed to never again find myself in such a precarious position so I promptly started to work on configuring the backup watchguard unit to backup the zywall. During my testing I was shocked at how fast pfsense was. The interface was quick and snappy but the performance of the switching is what really impressed me. It ran circles around the zywall despite the fact that the latter has a 6 core mips cpu and the watchguard a dual core pentium xeon. I am about ready to move over to the watchguard xtm 520 as my permanent firewall in a week or so. Right now I don't VPN into my home office network but if I ever needed to I would seriously just go buy a netgate XG-1541 appliance. For a small to medium sized business the price to performance of a netgate appliance is superb.

JKnott

@caserojj

I recently bought a Qotom Q350G4 4200U mini PC, with i5 CPU, 4 GB memory, 64 GB SSD and 4 Ethernet ports.

DominikHoffmann

I am very happy with my SG-1100. I have been running it for about nine months. Before that I was using an old PC and didn’t realize that it’s built-in Ethernet port was only 100Base-T and therefore throttling my ISP’s speed.

I have not seen any performance degradation that would lead me to believe that the SG-1100 is overloaded. Some of the other posters have mentioned their SG-2100 and SG-3100 appliances, but even those may be overkill for a home network. Mine got a pretty good workout with two to three of my kids doing Zooms concurrently, when schools were still on a hybrid model. There was never any slowdown for anything else, either.

johnpoz

@dominikhoffmann said in What are people using as there pfsense firewall/router?:

even those may be overkill for a home network

While I agree with you to a point, depends on what your "home" internet speeds are.. While I believe the sg1100 would suite many a home user for sure.. Prob not going to cut it if your on gig/gig home internet connection. Which is becoming more an more popular.

What is your isp plan you are paying for X/Y down/up in mbps? Just curious..

I would be first to admit my 4860 is a bit overkill for my 500/50 connection.. That might not always be my plan.. I am waiting for 1000/1000 for sure, and I like having the multiple physical interfaces because I have many local networks that I route between.

swampkracker

i5-3470 with 8GB of RAM and 3 ethernet interfaces for my 100/6 service.

JKnott

@johnpoz said in What are people using as there pfsense firewall/router?:

I am waiting for 1000/1000 for sure, and I like having the multiple physical interfaces because I have many local networks that I route between.

I have seen over 800 Mb down on my 500/20 connection, with my Qotom computer & CLI speedtest. Here's the best I've done using a browser, on a computer behind pfsense. I never saw anything close to that with the old HP computer I had been using.

DominikHoffmann

@johnpoz: I have a 75/75 for $90/mo, and I just measured 65/72. When the “pandemic” started they took speed caps off for all customers without charging any extra, until the 2020 spring semester ended and did that again starting in the late fall. I saw speeds in the 400s both up and down. Alas, they are back to normal.

Where it would matter would be, if I had the desire to achieve LAN-like speeds between sites, for file server access. I don’t really have such applications. I do do cloud backups, but those are bottlenecked at the server end, anyway.

Should the need for higher throughput arise, I would love to be able to borrow an SG-2100 or SG-3100 to see, whether those would improve it. Not sure, whether Netgate could accommodate that.