Do I need a hard drive? If so, how much of a HDD/SSD do I need?
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I'm experimenting with pfSense (meaning that I'm cursing it frequently :o). One of the things I'd like to do is a caching proxy to ultimately function like an ad blocker. I think there's a package for that; either Squid(?) or Snort(?). In effect, something like Privoxy, though I hear that Privoxy and pfSense don't play well together.
I believe that the caching proxy uses HDD space though (I've been testing with the embedded USB image). I haven't been able to find requirements or guidelines or how much hard drive to put into the machine or if I need RAID or SSDs. For a few PCs and smart phones in a home environment, what kind of specs and gotchas should I be cognizant of?
I've currently got a dual core AMD AM2 with 4GB of RAM and 2x PCIe Intel NICs running my soon-to-be production machine.
I've got hard drives lying around. Do I need to install pfSense to the HDD, or should it be separate? Do I need the speed from an SSD? What size do I need?
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I cant speak to squid as I have never used it, but from a base pfsense perspective the hardware recommendations guide is correct. It uses about 1GB of disk space. It boots from this disk, and unless you install plugins/customizations really doesn't touch it much after boot, apart from writing some text logfile entries.
In is't base configuration pfSense is really light on the hardware. I don't think I've seen mine ever consume more than 300-400MB of RAM, or go above ~3% CPU on my haswell i5-4570T.
That being said, adding squid - I understand - is one of the more demanding plugins, and it may significantly increase the requirements of the system. I've just never seen a need for squid caching, as the clients do a pretty good job of caching themselves, and they also handle ad blocking via browser plugins pretty well as well.
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I'm experimenting with pfSense (meaning that I'm cursing it frequently :o). One of the things I'd like to do is a caching proxy to ultimately function like an ad blocker. I think there's a package for that; either Squid(?) or Snort(?). In effect, something like Privoxy, though I hear that Privoxy and pfSense don't play well together.
I believe that the caching proxy uses HDD space though (I've been testing with the embedded USB image). I haven't been able to find requirements or guidelines or how much hard drive to put into the machine or if I need RAID or SSDs. For a few PCs and smart phones in a home environment, what kind of specs and gotchas should I be cognizant of?
I've currently got a dual core AMD AM2 with 4GB of RAM and 2x PCIe Intel NICs running my soon-to-be production machine.
I've got hard drives lying around. Do I need to install pfSense to the HDD, or should it be separate? Do I need the speed from an SSD? What size do I need?
Squid cache doesn't require much resources if you use it as caching only (interceptiing proxy is another story)
Apart from disk storage, your AMD with 4GB RAM will work fine for just a few clients, 8 years ago I built pfSense 1.1 with squid cache to serve 150-200 office users, that PC was just a core duo CPU with 2GB RAM. If you look into squid user forum, you can see people building PC with 16G ram to serve 1000+ users.Disk space, you only have a few people, a few gig space will work, but the speed of storage will be more important as the cache supposed to have high hit rate (if the hit rate is too low which means squid doesn't fit into your environment) and therefore SSD will be better.