New PFsense router - OEM 2550L2D-MxPC Intel NM10 or Dell Poweredge 2950

[adamthepolak]

Hey guys so I'm getting a new pfsense router for my home and debating what route to go. I just built one for a small business and it came up to 500 dollars and I don't want to spend that much for myself. Im currently debating going super small with this;

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856205007OEM 2550L2D-MxPC
will the Dual Broadcom 57788 NICs give me troubles?
with 4 or 8 gbs of ram this will come to $250-$300

or I'm interested in going balls out and getting a server off ebay. I love playing with new hardware so I wouldn't mind going a bit more advanced to play with things. Just not sure is the jump in power consumption worth the trade off. All I really need the router for at home is VPN but like I said i wouldn't mind having the extra horsepower to play with things.

http://nees.umn.edu/facilities/DAQ/poweredge_2950.pdf
I can get this for ~$125 right now and it comes with 2x Xeon 5160 and 4 gb of ram. only thing id have to buy is a HDD cage and thats like 20 bucks from china, I have spare HDDs laying around to put in. But from reading around the power bill per year is going to be about 300 dollars.

Thanks for the input

[nasomi]

For your home, the PE2950 is WAY overpowered. I have a PE2950, 4 PE1950's, and numerous other servers with 300-500 people connected at any given time, and a PE2950 would be overkill for me. They come with dual 960w psu's and suck ginormous power, my electric bill is $500/mo. You'll throw away money and waste hardware with it.

If you are hellbent on it, search poweredge 1950 73gb on ebay, you'll find hdd's with cages ready to go.

My suggestion would be to go with something atom based. Your first link, with 1-2gb ram, will be more than enough most likely.

[adamthepolak]

@nasomi:

For your home, the PE2950 is WAY overpowered. I have a PE2950, 4 PE1950's, and numerous other servers with 300-500 people connected at any given time, and a PE2950 would be overkill for me. They come with dual 960w psu's and suck ginormous power, my electric bill is $500/mo. You'll throw away money and waste hardware with it.

If you are hellbent on it, search poweredge 1950 73gb on ebay, you'll find hdd's with cages ready to go.

My suggestion would be to go with something atom based. Your first link, with 1-2gb ram, will be more than enough most likely.

Thanks nasomi.

Im on vacation so ive literally spent all day going around the internet. The only reason im kinda leaning to the poweredge servers is because i found a seller in my city on kajiji who is selling power edge servers for stupidly cheap. $80 bucks for a PE2850 with a single xeon, 4 gb ram and 2 15k hard drives.

Im going to spend some more time looking on amazon for something small though. Im back at my parents so no more unlimited power usage :( . plus its going into my closet so i dont think there will be enough air flow/ i dont want to hear the noisey shit when i try to sleep

[nasomi]

$80 isn't a terrible deal, but they are power hogs. They suck tons of electricity, so while it's $80 now, plus $20-40/mo for however long you run it… If i wasn't running a ton of stuff I'd go with something a lot simpler.

They're also rack mount, and produce a fair amount of noise.

[adamthepolak]

I wont be home another 2 weeks so the hunt will continue till then!!!

[charliem]

@adamthepolak:

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856205007OEM 2550L2D-MxPC
will the Dual Broadcom 57788 NICs give me troubles?
with 4 or 8 gbs of ram this will come to $250-$300

These Broadcom NICs, and these "OEM Production" machines in particular, work just fine with pfsense.

[adamthepolak]

@charliem:

@adamthepolak:

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856205007OEM 2550L2D-MxPC
will the Dual Broadcom 57788 NICs give me troubles?
with 4 or 8 gbs of ram this will come to $250-$300

These Broadcom NICs, and these "OEM Production" machines in particular, work just fine with pfsense.

Thank you so much, unless i find something else I think I may go with the OEM box

[adamthepolak]

I found some solid SFF pcs after hunting through amazon and going back to the retailers website. Im not promoting this company, just wat I found.
http://www.mitxpc.com/proddetail.asp?prod=EKZNM70DLT3410&cat=209
These go for 220 with 4 gigs of ram, for now im going to be using it for vpn and ill add other features down the road. Question here is will i encounter problems with the Gigabit ports?
They also have dual intel nic builds as well but they put the price up to 260. They are atom cpus so ill be limited with ram down the road but I dont think id be able to bottleneck it with just vpn.

[rjcrowder]

@charliem:

@adamthepolak:

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856205007OEM 2550L2D-MxPC
will the Dual Broadcom 57788 NICs give me troubles?
with 4 or 8 gbs of ram this will come to $250-$300

These Broadcom NICs, and these "OEM Production" machines in particular, work just fine with pfsense.

I've purchased two of them with good luck… the only thing you might want to consider is getting a quieter CPU fan. That said - if you're brave you could probably just run it without a fan - doesn't get particularly hot.