Is the Netgate m1n1wall firewall good enough for pfSense?

bbzidane

Hello all,

I have been using pfSense for a good couple of years and all is great.
Running off a 500mhz Celeron with 256mb RAM I think.
Having moved recently, I left my existing setup with my parents, and currently stuck with an Actiontec GT704-WG modem/router
which I frequently wonder if it is good enough to handle my downloads

After visiting the recommended hardware page, I caught my eye on the Netgate m1n1wall firewall
One of the cheapest ready to go system I have come across
it has the 128mb ram that is strongly recommended and I can always switch out the CF for a microdrive later on the road.

What I'm looking for is a basic router/firewall for home use, able to handle up to 10 users (when I decide to offload somewhere else), able to handle a 5Mb (megabit) connection and a lot of connections for torrents

So does anyone have any experience with the Netgate m1n1wall using pfSense?
The only machines I have with me are laptops, so no serial port, but I can always take the Netgate with me to work and get it setup there, hopefully it isn't too much trouble to do so on a Linux box.

Thanks

sullrich

@bbzidane:

Hello all,

I have been using pfSense for a good couple of years and all is great.
Running off a 500mhz Celeron with 256mb RAM I think.
Having moved recently, I left my existing setup with my parents, and currently stuck with an Actiontec GT704-WG modem/router
which I frequently wonder if it is good enough to handle my downloads

After visiting the recommended hardware page, I caught my eye on the Netgate m1n1wall firewall
One of the cheapest ready to go system I have come across
it has the 128mb ram that is strongly recommended and I can always switch out the CF for a microdrive later on the road.

What I'm looking for is a basic router/firewall for home use, able to handle up to 10 users (when I decide to offload somewhere else), able to handle a 5Mb (megabit) connection and a lot of connections for torrents

So does anyone have any experience with the Netgate m1n1wall using pfSense?
The only machines I have with me are laptops, so no serial port, but I can always take the Netgate with me to work and get it setup there, hopefully it isn't too much trouble to do so on a Linux box.

Thanks

5 megabit will be fine. Last I heard those will push ~ 30 megabit. Might want to hear from some HEAVY bittorrent users however…

hoba

m1n1wall are just pcengines wraps. These devices can be loaded with up tp 30 mbit/s (with big packets). However if you enable the trafficshpaer and load it with lots of states (tried several bittorrents, multiple ftp and http downloads at once) it will max out at around 12 mbit/s. i was not able to fully saturate my ADSL2+ 16mbit/1mbit line with it. Single downloads like ftp or http downloads with not much other traffic were running at 16 mbit down though. Hope that helps.

bbzidane

Now this is what I call support.

Thanks for the almost instantaneous response.
With your feedback, I can safely go ahead and purchase one, when it is in stock again that is.
After first using m0n0 then pfSense, I don't think I will be able to stand using a router/firewall that is not m0n0 or pfSense.

I guess my main concern is the lack of memory on the system. I know that 128mb is enough for me to running pfSense, and I have no plans to add any packages to it, but I'm just concerned of future-proofing it. Who knows if future releases would greatly benefit from more memory.

Thanks again

hoba

128 mb is enough to run the base featureset on it. Packages are not supported for embedded platforms and depending on the package you really need more ram then (snort for example eats a lot of ram).