Google Fiber and AT&T Uverse GigaPower - what do I need?
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Steve,
Thanks.
As I noted, given a pipe that fast, it's not like I'm going to get 300Mbit from any single connection most of the time. That's basic Internet 101. What I am saying is that if I were to go up all the way to their max speed (who of us wouldn't mind trying it out?), I certainly don't want my pfSense router to be the bottleneck. If I have a 100Mbit capable router, then there's no way I'd pay for 300Mbit service, I'd only pay for 100Mbit service.
As far as testing the alternative network layout: There is VERY little cabling changes involved. I have Cat5e everywhere, and it's capable of Gigabit speeds already (tested). It's all logical changes in the sense that I need to do a couple of different connections in the main closet and then the rest is VLANs. I can map it out on paper all I like, but the day I implement it, I'll be down for the duration while I change all the VLANs and go to a new router configuration for the very first time that will be doing some funky things (like sending a WAN VLAN through a couple of switches to my office, through a PFsense router, then back UP the same wire on a LAN VLAN to the same closet for distribution to the rest of the house). I'll probably be walking back and forth between switches with a laptop making changes with direct attached cables.
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Hmm, sounds like fun! Easy to make a mistake and incur the wrath of your users though. ;)
There are some passive cooling solutions for low end i3s or similar but they aren't cheap.Steve
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Yup. I really need to send the ladies off for a spa weekend somewhere and then tear my network apart and put it back together!
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If you don't mind me asking, what part of Austin are you in? I live in the Milwood area in Rattan Creek in MW and have not been able to get a straight answer from AT&T about GigaPower. I got Uverse as soon as it was available in my neighborhood and have been happy with it but with the news of Google Fiber and then GigaPower right after that, I wondered how long it would take.
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Honestly your requirements are a little bit ridiculous. You want a fanless passively cooled system that will handle 300+ Mb/s throughput? You can't even do that with ASIC devices. Find a closet you can put a small server in. Even a dual core AMD with 8 GB of RAM will do the job.
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I disagree. A passively cooled atom will firewall 300Mbps easily, in one direction. If you need to run other services like squid or snort then, yes, you'll need something a lot more powerful. Even so there are passive cooling solutions for 35W cpus for a reasonable cost, the Akasa Euler for example.
Steve
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300/300 is going to require something faster than an Atom, even just for firewall+NAT.
Not really, no.
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Honestly your requirements are a little bit ridiculous. You want a fanless passively cooled system that will handle 300+ Mb/s throughput? You can't even do that with ASIC devices.
LOL ;)
Even the 7541 (dual core Atom D525) does 1Gbps throughputs.
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Google Fiber has been announced in two locales (Kansas City, MO, and Austin, TX). In reaction, AT&T is bringing "Gigapower" to my Austin suburban neighborhood. Next month I will be getting up to 300Mbit symmetrical service over my FTTP connection (Fiber to my house, GigE Copper from there). Promises of true Gigabit in 2014.
You are aware that ESF is located in Austin, right?
Chris lives here (currently on AT&T at home). I live here (currently on Grande at home, AT&T FTTH in my neighborhood.)
The office is next door to what used to be CoreNAP (now zColo), and we run a 10Gbps fiber between our rack there and the office.Gimme moar bandwidth. ;D ;D ;D
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@gonzopancho:
Even the 7541 (dual core Atom D525) does 1Gbps throughputs.
Really?
I've not tested an atom for throughput but I know that many others have tried and failed to get close to Gigabit. I'm aware that you guys have done testing on that box so I'm sure you know better than me what it's capable of. How did you test it for Gigabit throughput? Most other users seem to top out at ~600Mbps.Steve
Edit: typo
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sorry, my mind is going. Happens when you age. :-X
In brief testing, with a standard ruleset, the alix passed 85 Mpbs, the 7541 passed 500 Mbps, and pfSense running in a VM running on a Dell R200 R200 passed 850 Mbps.
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@gonzopancho:
300/300 is going to require something faster than an Atom, even just for firewall+NAT.
Not really, no.
In my experience, no Atom, including the D2800 I have at home with i350 NICs, can FW+NAT more than 500-600Mbit/s. I haven't tried the current gen, but that has more to do with the fact that none of the NICs will work under FreeBSD 8.3. I suspect they'd be able to push 1Gbit/s or more through FW+NAT given the strong increase in IPC the reviews are reporting but we may not be able to actually test with pfSense until the FreeBSD 10 move.
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Honestly your requirements are a little bit ridiculous. You want a fanless passively cooled system that will handle 300+ Mb/s throughput? You can't even do that with ASIC devices. Find a closet you can put a small server in. Even a dual core AMD with 8 GB of RAM will do the job.
I've built a i3-3220T + DQ77KB in an akasa euler thin-itx fanless case, it is rated to 35W TDP cpus. Dual intel NIC onboard, with some DIY on the backplate you could put another one or two GbE ports from a minicard.
I believe it can do more depending on environment and the very conservative TDP intel uses on recent cpus, so if you really need something faster the 45W quad core E3 1265Lv2 is quite powerful though not cheap.
So far I have not seen a haswell thin-itx as it would be nice to get AES-NI at i3 prices, and the intel DQ77KB is hard to find at a fair price. (also a caveat about certain NICs not being supported properly, 82576 = no, i350 = single channel ram issue)
There are also some passive cases coming out for NUCs, if you can figure out a way to have two physical ports* with a dongle NIC that doesn't suck those could be quite nice.
(*without doing the Very Bad Idea
of using only VLANs on a switch to separate WAN from LAN) -
Just go for a simple i3 with 4GB RAM config. You should be good for years. Check out the latest Haswell processor and motherboard compatibility (If I am not mistaken, its on these forums somewhere.. folks have done it). Stick a passive heat sink on it and it should be quiet enough.
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@gonzopancho:
300/300 is going to require something faster than an Atom, even just for firewall+NAT.
Not really, no.
In my experience, no Atom, including the D2800 I have at home with i350 NICs, can FW+NAT more than 500-600Mbit/s. I haven't tried the current gen, but that has more to do with the fact that none of the NICs will work under FreeBSD 8.3. I suspect they'd be able to push 1Gbit/s or more through FW+NAT given the strong increase in IPC the reviews are reporting but we may not be able to actually test with pfSense until the FreeBSD 10 move.
You seem to have missed the part where we have several of these in-house now.
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@gonzopancho:
@gonzopancho:
300/300 is going to require something faster than an Atom, even just for firewall+NAT.
Not really, no.
In my experience, no Atom, including the D2800 I have at home with i350 NICs, can FW+NAT more than 500-600Mbit/s. I haven't tried the current gen, but that has more to do with the fact that none of the NICs will work under FreeBSD 8.3. I suspect they'd be able to push 1Gbit/s or more through FW+NAT given the strong increase in IPC the reviews are reporting but we may not be able to actually test with pfSense until the FreeBSD 10 move.
You seem to have missed the part where we have several of these in-house now.
Several of what? I don't know what you're talking about when you reference "these". I just skimmed the thread again and aside from some benchmark numbers you posted for an older Atom, I don't see you mentioning having anything specific in-house. If you've got one of the new 8-core atoms working, NICs and all, please post up some numbers; I'd love to see them.
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If you don't mind me asking, what part of Austin are you in? I live in the Milwood area in Rattan Creek in MW and have not been able to get a straight answer from AT&T about GigaPower. I got Uverse as soon as it was available in my neighborhood and have been happy with it but with the news of Google Fiber and then GigaPower right after that, I wondered how long it would take.
I am in Leander, in Crystal Falls. New development with Fiber to the Home.
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Honestly your requirements are a little bit ridiculous. You want a fanless passively cooled system that will handle 300+ Mb/s throughput? You can't even do that with ASIC devices. Find a closet you can put a small server in. Even a dual core AMD with 8 GB of RAM will do the job.
Honestly your response is a little bit ridiculous.
I asked a question because I don't know these things. Where is the secret decoder on how many MIPs it takes per Megabit of throughput? If you point it out to me, I'll do my own calculations. Besides, there are many types of passively cooled systems that are very high power. They just get cost prohibitive.
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@gonzopancho:
You are aware that ESF is located in Austin, right?
Chris lives here (currently on AT&T at home). I live here (currently on Grande at home, AT&T FTTH in my neighborhood.)
The office is next door to what used to be CoreNAP (now zColo), and we run a 10Gbps fiber between our rack there and the office.Gimme moar bandwidth. ;D ;D ;D
Wow, didn't realize that! I relocated to the Austin area in 2012 as well (just picked that up from your web site)
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I may have solved my challenge for now.
I have installed pfsense in a VM on one of my ESXi hosts. I have set it up with CARP to fail over to my ALIX. Complicated due to use of VLANs to pipe the various networks between the network panel in my closet to my office where the VMware cluster lives, but it works.
If it works well and isn't flakey, I'll keep this setup and the ALIX will just be my slow speed fallback when my VM is down.
