Hardware choices with internal switch? (ala Linksys)
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Ah - yep, I completely forgot about bridging. Thanks for the reminder, Jimp!
Depending on your budget, you can just get a mini-itx box with a PCIx riser and add a quad-port PCI NIC. That could potentially give you 6 ports (2 onboard and 4 via expansion card).
I was just pricing a similar system from mini-box.com. This is the M300 barebones box for $210 and comes with a PCI riser card - http://www.mini-box.com/Mini-Box-M350-Barebone-System. You can add additional parts as necessary (scroll to the bottom). Simply add a quad-port ethernet card and you are in business.
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Jimp, please correct me if I'm wrong: with bridged interfaces the CPU still has to push the traffic between the IFs, right?
This would limit the amount of traffic between IFs to what the CPU/bus can handle as compared to a dedicated switch which should be able to do this at link speed easily. -
Jimp, please correct me if I'm wrong: with bridged interfaces the CPU still has to push the traffic between the IFs, right?
This would limit the amount of traffic between IFs to what the CPU/bus can handle as compared to a dedicated switch which should be able to do this at link speed easily.That is correct. A real switch will always be better in this situation unless you need to control traffic between ports.
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So that being said, nobody knows of a product which has an internal switch that can operate as a single LAN "port" as far as pfSense is concerned?
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Bump.
No other suggestions?
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I suppose you're looking for something like that:
http://www.pcloft.com/asinrocapcie.html
–> A NIC with integrated switch. -
That looks like what I'm looking for, but it has other things that I hope I can turn off. I need to find out of the chip they use works with BSD.
Edit:
Found one. The HP NC150T.It's a lot more than I want to spend, but it's exactly. Now to see if there is a 100Mb (& cheaper) alternative.
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I suppose you're looking for something like that:
http://www.pcloft.com/asinrocapcie.html
–> A NIC with integrated switch.I just built a system with a card very close to this and it shows up as a single network port but all 4 ports work great.
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Williamray507, what card did you use?
I'm looking for such a card myself right now. -
I'm firing this topic back up again to see if the landscape has changed.
Has anyone come up with an inexpensive pfSense compatible box (approx ALIX speed or better) that has a 4-port integrated LAN switch? I'm still at a point where it is difficult to recommend pfSense to my friends who only need 3 or 4 PC's plugged in without using a separate switch. dd-wrt usually fills that void, but it's impossible to upgrade remotely.