Refurbished HW for pfSense - McAfee NGF-325 - Success
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Dear community,
as a long time happy user of pfSense on Alix boards I came across depreciated HW appliances - McAfee Next Generation Firewall Appliances - namely model NGF-325 with dual core Intel Atom CPU and 4 GB of ECC 1333 DDR 3 RAM.I can confirm, that pfSense 2.7.2 can be installed and used on this device without any HW tweaks (well, I unplugged the noisy FAN, still temperature is under 35 degrees Celsius).
This particular modem has 5 1Gbit ports.
It uses CFast Compact Flash as a storage, seems rock solid so far.
There is also a WiFi network card (Atheros 9280), did not really make any use of it, but the system can see it and use it.The installation over serial console was rather simple once in bios the console speed was set to 115200. The boot mode was set to UEFI or dual.
HW details worth mentioning:
CPU: Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU C2358 @ 1.74GHz (1750.00-MHz K8-class CPU)
Origin="GenuineIntel" Id=0x406d8 Family=0x6 Model=0x4d Stepping=8
Features=0xbfebfbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,CLFLUSH,DTS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM,PBE>
Features2=0x43d8e3bf<SSE3,PCLMULQDQ,DTES64,MON,DS_CPL,VMX,EST,TM2,SSSE3,CX16,xTPR,PDCM,SSE4.1,SSE4.2,MOVBE,POPCNT,TSCDLT,AESNI,RDRAND>
AMD Features=0x28100800<SYSCALL,NX,RDTSCP,LM>
AMD Features2=0x101<LAHF,Prefetch>
Structured Extended Features=0x2282<TSCADJ,SMEP,ERMS,NFPUSG>
Structured Extended Features3=0xc000400<MD_CLEAR,IBPB,STIBP>
VT-x: PAT,HLT,MTF,PAUSE,EPT,UG,VPID
TSC: P-state invariant, performance statisticsaesni0: <AES-CBC,AES-CCM,AES-GCM,AES-ICM,AES-XTS>
In case you are interested in anything, let me know.
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I had/have one of those and it worked great. CompactFast storage is novel.
However it died with typical C2K CPU failure symptoms.
Most of those will have a lot of hours on and might also fail so be aware.
Steve
