Bit of advice for a newbie needed..
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Hey folks new here.. go easy I'm a total newbie with this stuff :D
I've pretty much decided on building myself a pfsense router for my SOHO network.. and have been weighing up various hardware options.. from a full blown pc, to various mini itx systems etc..
Today, I stumbled across this… Jetway JBC362F36-2600 - http://linitx.com/product/13607I thought, nice and compact.. lower power consumption than a PC, pricing isn't horrendous.. but just wanted to make sure it'd be suitable.
Probably run it off aCF card*, and add a miniPCIe wifi card to it too..Will it do the job?
Cheers..
*Strike that, just seen the price of CFAST cards might as well stick in an SSD.
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Hey folks new here.. go easy I'm a total newbie with this stuff :D
I've pretty much decided on building myself a pfsense router for my SOHO network.. and have been weighing up various hardware options.. from a full blown pc, to various mini itx systems etc..
Today, I stumbled across this… Jetway JBC362F36-2600 - http://linitx.com/product/13607I thought, nice and compact.. lower power consumption than a PC, pricing isn't horrendous.. but just wanted to make sure it'd be suitable.
Probably run it off aCF card*, and add a miniPCIe wifi card to it too..Will it do the job?
Cheers..
*Strike that, just seen the price of CFAST cards might as well stick in an SSD.
yeah, as you noticed, CFAST cards are not Compact Flash cards. They're basically the SATA version of Compact Flash (as Compact Flash is ATA/PATA/IDE, natively.) Since they're new and a fairly niche market, they're not cheap.
I would not expect the NIC's to work in the current pfSense 2.0.2 version. It should work in dev snapshots of 2.1, but, you're running development versions.
Here's the link directly to Jetway's page on the board: http://www.jetway.com.tw/jw/barebone_view.asp?productid=946&proname=JBC362F36-2600-B / JBC362F36W-2600-B
It is cute, though.
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Oh well back to the drawing board then :)
.. at least till 2.1 is released, thanks matguy
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Have you considered a repurposed notebook? They can make excellent pfSense routers. And have built in nearly everything, UPS, keyboard, console display, onboard NIC. Can either use a VLAN capable switch or add a pc card or USB NIC for WAN interface.
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Oh well back to the drawing board then :)
.. at least till 2.1 is released, thanks matguy
The current 2.1 builds are stable, but still have a few mostly ipv6 and captive portal related issues. Many people have been running them for a long long time. I wouldn't count it as a reason not to buy that sweet little box :)
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Yeah I might give the laptop idea a bit of a whirl, I don't know why but I'd effectively ruled it out.. but it would make sense ('scuse the pun) for the time being.
I'll hold off the dev builds till I'm happy with tinkering with pfsense, besides I do have a potential use for the captive portal..
Thanks for the help guys :)
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Yeah, if you have a VLAN capable switch or a PCMCIA NIC sitting around, an old laptop can be damn decent. I even have a few PCMCIA -> CF adapters sitting around that would probably make that work even better, I use 'em to flash the CF cards. Or, there's a lot of 2.5" Hard drive to CF adapters, both PATA and SATA, but at that point it might make sense to just get a standard SSD, especially if you don't have the CF card already.
Remember, though, standard CardBus is 33MB/s, in a perfect world where both the laptop and the card can run in dword mode it can get 133MB/s, but I don't know the odds of that coming together. What that means is a Gb card might not transfer anywhere near 1Gb/s, maybe roughly 1/3 that. Although, for most WANs, that's fine.
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I've never seen a laptop that could boot from pcmcia, did they exist? I guess in IDE mode maybe.
Steve
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Yeah I might give the laptop idea a bit of a whirl
No personal experience but have read that Lenovo's don't work so well with pfSense. So may want to steer clear of those. I'm running a DELL Inspiron 5100 with the VLAN for WAN interface and a Netgear GS108T SmartSwitch.
