Need alternative to my Alix or APU? Under $350
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That's the unit I've been looking at as well (lots of sellers on aliexpress.com). It would be great if you could post your experiences with it.
I just got it straight from eBay. Will definitely post experiences. I think it will be well over specced so speed will not be an issue.
hmm. no AES-NI? No Intel NICS? possibly but I would be cautious.
Definitely AES but no Intel NICS. They are Realtek RTL-8111 which are supported on FreeBSD so I can't see too many issues, Realtek aren't too bad ;)
Not sure which post you're referring to but the N3150 does have AES (but not Intel NICS).
http://ark.intel.com/products/87258/Intel-Celeron-Processor-N3150-2M-Cache-up-to-2_08-GHzCorrect! :)
I will post experiences shortly. They are so cheap, I'm thinking of buying another one for redundancy in the unlikely event it fails.
It came with unactivated Win 7 build which scores pretty well on Windows Experience score, I'm thinking it will fly :)
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hmm. no AES-NI? No Intel NICS? possibly but I would be cautious.
Personally I don't need AES-NI, but I wouldn't build a pfSense box without Intel NIC's, or at the very least Broadcom NetXtreme nics.
Realtek NIC's are absolute garbage. it's such a shame that all the most affordable motherboards integrate that trash on board, because if you get one of those boards you're just going to have to disable it, and consume a PCIe slot with a real NIC.
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Network Card Selection
Selection of network cards (NICs) is often the single most important performance factor in your setup. Inexpensive NICs can saturate your CPU with interrupt handling, causing missed packets and your CPU to be the bottleneck. A quality NIC can substantially increase system throughput. When using pfSense software to protect your wireless network or segment multiple LAN segments, throughput between interfaces becomes more important than throughput to the WAN interface(s).
NICs based on Intel chipsets tend to be the best performing and most reliable when used with pfSense software. We therefore strongly recommend purchasing Intel cards, or systems with built-in Intel NICs up to 1Gbps. Above 1Gbps, other factors, and other NIC vendors dominate performance.
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Installed pfSense last night. Perfect! NIC detected 100% and operating at 1gbps. Haven't tested throughput yet.
Using between 0- 3% CPU and 5% RAM.
I only have a 30mbps connection to the internet, how can I test max supported throughput? This is a home scenario so I don't have access to too much infrastructure to fiddle with network infrastructure.
Willo
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You could do an iperf test or try testing between 2 pfSense locally though that would not give you real world but just what the port is capable of in an unrealistic scenario. Still might be useful to see what the maximum throughput is…
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Agreed.
There really isn't a good way to test max throughput on a local network.
You can use iperf -s to set up a test server on a computer attached to the WAN port, and iperf -c <ip address="" of="" other="" machine="">on a machine attached to the LAN port and see what kind of throughput you get, but this still isn't a very good test as it only tests the performance with a single state in the NAT state table.
If you had access to a gigabit or better connection, I'd have a few machines on the local network hop on different (legal) torrents for something popular (like the largest Ubuntu ISO you can find, or something like that) and see where it peaks. That should get you to network saturation with many NAT table entries in a hurry, but as mentioned it would require having a WAN connection that can saturate your 1gbit NIC's to get reliable results.
In the end - however - what really matters is, can your router saturate your current connection, and if that connection is 30Mbit, I'd argue you have absolutely NOTHING to worry about with that box.</ip>
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Just thought I would update this.
The box with PFSense installed is still running strong and VERY low usage. I've installed SquidGuard on it and I have using NZB files I am consistently hitting my 30mbps limit on the internet connection.
Overall for the pittance I paid for the hardware, I'm very pleased with both the hardware and PFSense.
Thank you