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    Dimensiong a fanless PC for 300Mb/s fiber connection

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    • G
      GL
      last edited by

      Hello All,
      I just upgraded my home connection to a fiber one with 300 Mb/s download stream and 20 Mb/s upload stream and i would like to dimension a fanless PC to install pfsense.
      The fiber reaches my flat in the living room, so for me it is mandatory to use a fanless PC with dual Intel NIC.
      I would like to run snort and squid with ClamAV and I will use many of pfsense functionalities and/or additional packages.
      At home I have several laptops, one NAS and mobile devices, plus some streaming device. I plan to disable checks on streaming devices, however I am worried about the routing workload by the streaming devices, so I would like to properly dimension the appliance.
      In the internal network, all devices are connected by a Netgear access point and two Cisco entry level Gb switches.
      Which kind of processor should I use, Celeron quad core, Pentium or Core i3,i5,i7?
      How much memory? (8GB, 16GB)?
      When I count the cores, may I relay on Hyperthreading, is pfsense able to manage it? So can I buy a Core i3/i5 with 2 cores and 4 threads?
      I apologize if some question may appear silly to the community, but I am new to pfsense (before I was using a different appliance).
      Thanks in advance to anyone willing to help me.

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      • JailerJ
        Jailer
        last edited by

        There's a few options in the pfsense store that fit the bill of what you are looking for.

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        • P
          pfBasic Banned
          last edited by

          You can use a passively cooled celeron.

          For a reference point, I use pfBlockerNG, Suricata (with rules that average ~25k blocks/month), OpenVPN clients & servers (one LAN routes all traffic through the VPN clients on a gateway group) I have probably 10-15 clients on the network including several streaming clients. I have an old eBay special with i5-2400 & 8GB RAM, my system averages <3% usage and maxes out around <15%. You can see my system only spikes above ~5% about 10 times in a week. My line is only 50/5 though.

          Depending on your packages you can use a lot of RAM with suricata and pfBlockerNG (especially if you want TLD).

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          • P
            pfBasic Banned
            last edited by

            I just so happened to upgrade to a 150/10 service today.

            I ran a bunch of 4k youtube videos to get it close to load and see what the system was doing.

            ~28% CPU @ ~130Mbps

            Keep in mind this is all traffic being encrypted at AES-256-CBC, so the load is significantly higher than you would see without VPN, or with a more reasonable encryption level (AES-256 is unnecessary in almost all home use cases to include mine).

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            • G
              GL
              last edited by

              Hello,
              many thanks for your reply.
              So we can say that a 4 core celeron with 8 GB should be enough.
              I just a final question: which size for the HD? (30 GB, 60GB, 120 GB)?
              Thanks in advance.
              Bye,
              GL

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              • V
                VAMike
                last edited by

                @GL:

                I just a final question: which size for the HD? (30 GB, 60GB, 120 GB)?

                If you're just doing firewalling (no high-volume logging) then the cheapest one.

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                • ?
                  Guest
                  last edited by

                  So we can say that a 4 core celeron with 8 GB should be enough.

                  Yes for 300/20 it is well suited.

                  I just a final question: which size for the HD? (30 GB, 60GB, 120 GB)?

                  30 GB - single firewall perhaps snort
                  60 GB - firewall, squid, snort, logging
                  120 GB - firewall, squid as caching proxy, snort logging
                  Please verify that the mSATA is supporting TRIM before buying.

                  I would try to tune it right with the following options;

                  • enable TRIM support
                  • set the mbuf size to 1000000
                  • enable PowerD (high adaptive)
                  • set the mbuf queue to max.4 (sometimes it helps sometimes it is failing pending on your Internet connection you must find that out)
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                  • P
                    pfBasic Banned
                    last edited by

                    In line with the fanless / no moving parts theme I would get a cheap SSD.

                    https://smile.amazon.com/ADATA-ISC3E-Industrial-Grade-Temperature-ISC3E-008GT/dp/B01LYD5FXT/ref=sr_1_10?s=pc&rps=1&ie=UTF8&qid=1490286944&sr=1-10&refinements=p_n_feature_three_browse-bin%3A14027456011%2Cp_85%3A2470955011

                    https://smile.amazon.com/Transcend-MSA370-mSATA-Solid-TS32GMSA370/dp/B00K64HXRS/ref=sr_1_8?s=pc&rps=1&ie=UTF8&qid=1490286944&sr=1-8&refinements=p_n_feature_three_browse-bin%3A14027456011%2Cp_85%3A2470955011

                    If you want you can even do a flash drive install on 2.4 BETA but I wouldn't unless you have enough RAM for a RAM disk.

                    https://smile.amazon.com/SanDisk-Cruzer-Blade-Flash-SDCZ50/dp/B00HR36OC6/ref=pd_sim_147_3?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B00HR36OC6&pd_rd_r=DB9C6EMGB784ZEZQW7RA&pd_rd_w=livND&pd_rd_wg=V2PGn&psc=1&refRID=DB9C6EMGB784ZEZQW7RA

                    If you want totally fanless check out picoPSU's. You can get an 80W non-WI and 60W AC/DC adapter shipped for ~$40. Great if you are looking for a totally silent box.

                    http://www.mini-box.com/picoPSU-80-60W-power-kit

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