Asus H110T
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This has been asked thousands of times, will xyz hardware work with pfsense.
But I've been looking for a while at all the MB brands and think this would fit my needs now and in the future. What I'm thinking of is a ASUS H110T with a Celeron CPU with 4GB ram, I know that board has a 1 Realtek nic and 1 Intel nic - I was thing the realtek would go on the 'slower' WAN side and the Intel on the LAN. I would think this setup would easily route at gigabyte speeds to a VLAN switch ?
Randombits
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Probably, if the Realtek NIC can pass it.
Which Celeron exactly?
Steve
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Maybe a minimum of a G3900
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Yes, that will pass 1Gbps. If that's between internal VLANs though you won't actually be able to reach that as all the traffic sharing a single Ethernet connection.
Steve
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That's my only concern is all traffic will be over 1 gig trunk to the VLAN switch, I'm new'ish to PFsense, by between internal VLAN's I guess you mean routing VLAN's over same interface or VM's ?
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Yes I mean routing between VLANs that share the same trunk connection to pfSense.
Theoretically, since the port is 1Gbps full duplex, a 1Gbps stream of traffic should be able to come into the port one one VLAN and leave on another VLAN. But if that's TCP the reply packets in the other direction will interrupt that as would any other traffic so you won't ever actually see 1Gbps.
How often do you actually need to use the full bandwidth a Gigabit connection provides though? And how often is that between different VLANs?Steve
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Fair comments, really two or three PC's would need full bandwidth to each other (video stuff)the other stuff on the network is slow speed Raspberry PI's and VOIP etc. It might be better for me with a different motherboard with a PCIe slot and an Intel 4 port gig card and have two VLAN switch's on two of the ports in the PCIe, that way it'll give a lot more flexibility longer term and reducing bottle necks.r
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If those three PCs are in the same subnet then that traffic would only ever go through the switch and the firewall would never see it. If they are not then it may only be very occasionally they are transferring between them in which case it may be good enough anyway.
Of course you may find you segregate more stuff once you have pfSense installed and then more NICs will help.Steve
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Thanks Steve, Very good point on being on the same subnet. I have another think how to divide things up, I also have several low speed Wifi IOT devices which be better not on the subnet as he PC's. It's always the same with home networks and computers - pick one only Speed, power consumption, future proof. I think the Asus H110T is good board but not expandable, A board with more network ports or a PCIe slot would be better longer term. Thanks for point things out that I didn't think of !