Hotel with 300 people max, 2 VDSL lines, PC Engines APU4 enough?

costasppc

Hello,

We are going to set up WiFi APs in a hotel with 300 people capacity max (sometimes is full). They will get 2 VDSL lines. As for pfsense (WAN routing and firewalling, no IDS), do you think that a PC Engines APU4 is enough to handle the load, or shall we check for a regular small factor PC, like an HP Compaq 8200 Elite Small Form Factor PC?

pfBasic

How much bandwidth on the WAN?

costasppc

Waiting for ISP to respond, but it will be either 2 x 24 or 2 x 50 Mbps.

Best regards

Kostas

pfBasic

That connection should be easily attainable on just about any hardware.

That being said this is the first time I've heard of the APU4, https://store.netgate.com/APU4.aspx

I don't really know how the netgate / pfSense integration works as that is sold on netgates site but not the pfSense store?
So I guess it is offical-ish?
I don't know why there is a

netgate.com/products/pfsense-appliance.html
and
store.netgate.com/pfSense/systems.aspx
Selling the same stuff?

I find it strange that a netgate pfSense box would be sold with realtek NICs.

Hopefully someone else can chime in on this product, seems weird to me.

Again your needs won't require a high-end firewall so it should be fine. Your main concern should be getting quality WAP's (ubiquiti).

Derelict

The Netgate APU4 was a PC Engines AMD T40E APU with 4GB RAM. The Netgate APU2 was the same unit with 2GB RAM. Both had three Realtek NICs. They were generally not of the problematic variety.

PC Engines later shipped an APU2 board with Intel NICs to add to the confusion. Netgate never shipped anything based on that board.

An APU4 should handle that workload. I would probably want to run a standard install on mSATA instead of SD/NanoBSD though.

An SG-2440 or SG-4860 would be what I would use, however. Maybe even a pair of them configured High-Availability. I question the plan to deploy an essentially-obsolete device in a new installation.

pfBasic

Thanks for the clarification!

The APU units get recommended a lot on here because they are relatively cheap, very low power and can handle the load of most home users not interested in heavy duty packages. Derelict has a great point about them being obsolete though. The SG units also come with support and a year of Gold, the APU4 does not.