Building a router. Need some advice
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Hello everyone.. Newbie here. I'm trying to put some old hardware to use and build us a fancy new router with a nice firewall and other features that our Linksys WRT160N is sorely lacking. I had considered flashing OpenWRT or Tomato on it, but I wanted to have a little more fun. I had a nice system all picked out and was seconds away from sticking the pfSense install disc in when the motherboard decided to go to the great motherboard in the sky. So I'm going to donate my old computer parts and rebuild the machine as it has a nice rackmount case I want to reuse. My old system is an AMD X2 3800+ 2.0GHz with an Abit motherboard using the nForce4 chipset (if I recall correctly) with 1 gig of RAM which should be more than enough to power our little network. So my first question: How big of a hard drive should I consider using?
While my old motherboard has a gigabit controller, I was curious if that was actually necessary? We have a gigabit network, and the WAN card I have will be 10/100 (more than enough), and I'll use the gigabit port to connect to the network. The system that just died had all 10/100's in it, but I was going to try anyways. How much actual network traffic will be routed through the pfSense box though?
So far I've managed to spend nothing on this project, which is pretty awesome in my book. A friend gave me some old NICs to try, so I didn't have to buy a new NIC for it. For wireless I'll re-purpose our Linksys to either act as an AP, or keep it off of our network completely I'll give it another ISP IP address and it can run on it's own connection.
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How big of a hard drive should I consider using?
If you run a "basic" pfSense then 1GB is more than enough. If you want to run a web cache on your box then "as much as you want" (though there is some relationship I have seen quoted between RAM size and disk cache size).
How much actual network traffic will be routed through the pfSense box though?
If you use only two interfaces then "no more than the speed of your slowest link". Traffic between computers on your LAN will not normally go through pfSense.
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How much actual network traffic will be routed through the pfSense box though?
If you use only two interfaces then "no more than the speed of your slowest link". Traffic between computers on your LAN will not normally go through pfSense.
I didn't think so. The only thing it's going to be doing is handling DHCP, firewalling, routing internet traffic around, etc. Like I said it's going to replace our Linksys and that's about all it does. Beyond that I'm not sure what else I'm going to do with it. Won't really know until it's actually up and running and I get to play with it.
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If you have disk (and/or RAM), and your link is (relatively) slow, caching can be very beneficial to perceived speed. A "slow" disk access at 1Gb/s looks like warp speed next to a 10Mb/s link, or even a 100Mb/s link - especially if the link is working on the "non-cache" material while the cache is serving up what it has on the local net.
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The minimums for pfSense are here.
I use pfSense for my home network, it's perfect for me! I came from a consumer grade "everything" router, and pfSense is better in all ways. My pfSense build is here.
How big of a hard drive should I consider using?
Storage space really depends on what services your planning to run. I run Squid (for caching) with Lightsquid reporting. My disk usage varys between ~25%-40% on a 60GB drive. I have 4GB of memory and it's usage varies between ~40%-80%. Both of these are dependent on the squid cache settings, among other things. I presume in my case these deltas are from squid caching, as I have no additional logging turned on.
While my old motherboard has a gigabit controller, I was curious if that was actually necessary?
What is your WAN bandwidth? If it's greater than 80-90mbps you might want Gb NIC, however that much bandwidth it is not likely at your home. More important I think is that your hardware is supported by pfSense.
How much actual network traffic will be routed through the pfSense box though?
I suggest your home network be setup like like this: WAN > router > switch with all your other devices (AP, printers, computers, etc.). If set up this way, the only traffic in/out the pfSense is internet traffic, which is at most the bandwidth your ISP provides.
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depending on your hardware.. If the onboard LAN chip happens to be Realtek, save yourself some trouble in future and disable it in BIOS in advance. All sorts of mystic crap can happen with it. Also, Realteks really like to hog/strangle your systems CPU. Also disable sound and anything else you do not need.
Use preferably cards from Intel, even if these are desktop cards and not server cards. Less issues.
When your are using multiple cards on a PCI slots, make sure you are not exceeding PCI bus throughput (couple of PCI gigabit cards could achieve this). The throughput varies depending on bus speed and if the slots are 32bit or 64bit. Lowest value is 133Megabytes/s, highest 533. Generally 266Megabytes per sec.
Older CPU-s might be too weak for handling high speed links, 1GHz+ recommended
You got AMD X2 3800+. So it's either S939,AM2 or AM2+.. too bad. If you had s754 motherboard you could have bought S754 mobile Turion64 ML/MT from Ebay and use it, Turions often worked on desktop Nforce4 boards,they support 64bit and have power a plenty (comparable to P3M) while not eating too much power..(25W/35W max TDP). One of the few possible options while trying for low-power system on old-tech.