Moving to Netgate appliance -- a few questions

SteveITS

@pf-beginner said in Moving to Netgate appliance -- a few questions:

actually a switch and not discrete ports

This optional guide shows the steps required to configure the 4 switched Ethernet ports as discrete ports.

johnpoz

There is a big difference between a switch port and a actual discrete interface.. Be it you use the switch port for 1 specific vlan or not.. Its not the same..

While functionally they can be discrete - at a hardware level its not the same. For 1 the 4 ports of the switch share the uplink to the routing..

All comes down to what your actually going to do with the device - there can be advantages with having switch ports, all comes down to what your actually doing..

I personally like have true discrete physical interfaces on my router, because I do switching on an actual switch ;)

SteveITS

@johnpoz well sure but if that’s not a concern the 3100 costs more. And it has the PHP bugs. Just pointing out the option.

pf.Beginner

@johnpoz Thanks for the detailed information on the switch port setup! I don't have a multi-port NIC to try this out with, but how would a 4-port pcie NIC be treated by pfSense? Would it also be considered to be a switch, or would it be four true discrete ports? Would the answer to this be based on how the pcie NIC was designed?

@SteveITS Thanks for the link. I will have to study this in some detail. I just read though it, but its somewhat confusing.

It seems somewhat counterintuitive to use VLANs to make the ports "discrete"... almost like the opposite of what a true discrete port would be. Anyway, I will look at it in more depth tomorrow and perhaps it will make more sense.

SteveITS

@pf-beginner said in Moving to Netgate appliance -- a few questions:

use VLANs to make the ports "discrete"

It emulates it so they behave like separate ports.

SteveITS

@pf-beginner re: 4 port card, it is four ports. The switch works that way because of the hardware Netgate uses in those models.

JKnott

@pf-beginner

You might want to do what I did. I bought a Qotom mini PC with i5 CPU, 4 GB of memory, 64 GB SSD and 4 Intel Ethernet ports, though other configurations are available. With an i5 CPU, they also have more performance than those Netgate boxes. They're shipped from Hong Kong, for what that's worth. I'm quite happy with mine.

Gertjan

@steveits said in Moving to Netgate appliance -- a few questions:

And it has the ~~PHP~~ bugs

I was more thinking : 'arm' issues.
Up until "3100" the devices are "arm" processor based.
The 5100 and up are 'intel' based.
I can't say the latter is better (intel gets hotter = uses more electricity that can sum up over a year - as you saw with your 'pc' solution).

Btw : I'm also a "discrete NIC fan", although I could share 10 times my combined network traffic need over just one multiplexed port == VLAN (WAN, and several LAN's) as my ISP delivers 22 Mbit/sec.

pf.Beginner

I was thinking of getting a Qotom, but availability is an issue… and then I thought about building a custom box. With the current chip shortage, there are not many low powered processors available right now; on some of them, there was a delivery time of over a month. About the only build I could put together in the next week or so would be so over powered and power hungry it was somewhat ridiculous. A Netgate should meet my modest requirements and at least be efficient.

JKnott

@pf-beginner

I bought my Qotom a couple of months ago and it took just over a week to arrive.