Greetings, and a Question
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I'm posting two topics in one: I come to these forums as a future home network guru, and am saying hi; and have a question for how best to set up for a Folding@Home/NAS farm I will set up in the future.
My name is JNTK984, or rather, that is my online name.
I'm not an expert in networking, but I do know a little bit.
I am passionate about Folding@Home, and plan to set up a 20 computer farm in the future, but would like to run their network as a separate entity to my main gaming system(s).
I was looking online at Newegg, and saw this: AOpen Digital Engine, and thought, that would be perfect. Then, reading the reviews, I heard mention of pfSense more than once, so I Googled it. Heard what could be described as Angels singing. (Previous attempts to have an old PC running a linux distro to more strongly filter out some annoying ads…as well as the usual bad stuff...I never got that to work.) I now use FireFox, and AdBlock Plus; together they are pretty decent.
On to my question: Can pfSense be set up to allow only web connections to certain IP addresses/domains? Like the Folding@Home servers, Google, and the various pages where driver updates could be downloaded? The second feature of the farm would be an Areca RAID card running about a dozen hard drives for storing my ever growing media collection, game installs, Maximum PC discs, etc. {each computer is set to have its own RAID card and an array} (While some would go for a 1400mb file vs. a full DVD ISO, I'm more fond of lossless quality...I have 9 of 10 seasons of Stargate SG-1 in ISO format on one drive, and the entire Star Trek: Voyager Series in full ISO format on another.)
Provided I can find an ISP who would not care about bandwidth, I'd want to be able to access anything stored on the farm while I'm away, whether it is from a few hours' drive away, or a few states away. Of course, at home too.
I'm not sure about the exact bancwidth I'd have, but I do know that I'm not going for DSL. Cable for me.
Can pfSense handle this? I don't fancy the idea of paying 20 licenses for antivirus, and would not want anything on my "black list" to get through to the farm.
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Can pfSense be set up to allow only web connections to certain IP addresses/domains? Like the Folding@Home servers, Google, and the various pages where driver updates could be downloaded?
Yes, that's no problem.
I'm not sure about the exact bancwidth I'd have, but I do know that I'm not going for DSL. Cable for me.
Can pfSense handle this? I don't fancy the idea of paying 20 licenses for antivirus, and would not want anything on my "black list" to get through to the farm.This question is a little confusing for me.
Are you asking 'can pfSense handle the traffic throughput'? It completely depends on the hardware and exactly what sort of bandwidth you are expecting. However even low end hardware will firewall 50-100Mbps with no trouble.
There are pfSense packages for doing antivirus at the firewall. HAVP for example.Steve
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Thanks for the answers. What I meant was would pfSense be able to handle the blocking of viruses, spyware, etc so the clients would have no issues and not be bottlenecked.
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Well it's a matter of matching your hardware with your bandwith requirements.
There is a page documenting this here though it's a bit dated now.
Adding virus scanning will increase the hardware requirement considerably. I don't have any figures for you unfortunately. :(Steve