Hardware advice: low-power home use
-
Love the machine, I was just worried about the Realtek. I'm sure they will be awesome though.
-
Anyone knows Atom C2358 appliance with a fanless configuration?
-
If you have lots and lots of connections/states I would recommend against Realtek –- I've been having problems with what I thought would be an awesome Mini-ITX Atom setup that I got for a steal ($75) with these specs:
Atom C330 Dual-Core 1.6GHz (w/ HT)
2GB DDR2
Jetway motherboard
1x PCI-E Gigabit Realtek (RealTek 8168/8111 B/C/CP/D/DP/E/F PCIe Gigabit Ethernet)
3x Gigabit Realtek provided by daughter board (RealTek 8169SC/8110SC Single-chip Gigabit Ethernet)First problem is, those 3x Gigabit Realtek are all PCI as I've since learned –- so at best, you're not going above 2Gbit/s total from those 3.
Second problem is how crappy Realtek drivers are on BSD: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?order=Importance&query_format=advanced&resolution=–-&short_desc=realtek&short_desc_type=substring
I personally encountered this sort of bug with those "Single-chip" PCI ports: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=166894
Of course this is all personal experience, but looking on the FreeBSD forums, the previous maintainer of the realtek drivers --- yongari --- talked about how crappy they were, until he disappeared.
-
Never buy untested hardware unless you want to be the tester and are prepared for problems.
-
I have built pfSense 2.1.5 x64 and running very smoothly on a 3rd Gen Intel I5-2400 on a Asus mATX board 1 onboard and two Intel PCI-e slotted NICs at 31 watts. Looking for some more electricity savings and box sizing for my clients.
Dec 14, - inplace upgrade to 2.2 rc x64 and things went south fast - lost squid, squidGuard, ServiceWatchDog, ipguard, SARG, firewall log reporting.
Every 25 watt savings yields 219 kilowatts/year - or $164 over 5 years at $0.15/kwh
Low power 2 nics onboard and wifi (options) are: (listed in lowest power consumption first)
1a. $187 - Jetway NU93-2930 - 101mm squared "NUC" aka "Mini-ITX" aka "Book Size" on Amazon?? Quad Core 4/4 1.82-2.16Ghz - Intel ARK http://ark.intel.com/products/81073/Intel-Celeron-Processor-N2930-2M-Cache-up-to-2_16-GHz?wapkw=n2930. Interesting "Shared mPCI-e" port that may be allowed for a mPCI-e GigE card/piggy-tail RJ45 since these cards appears to be full size and will not fit into the 1/2 mPCI-e slots.
NIC chipset is Intel WG82574L1b - 1a above that is put fully together in a NUC 1.5 case as Jetway JBC375F3AW-2930-B - $255 likely watts are 4.5 plus Wifi SSD = 6-7 watts. Also a pure "NUC" case barebone is Jetway JBC311U93W-2930-B - $220 - includes wifi 802.11n/BT
2. The J1900 Intel Family upgraded CPU base freq at 2.0 burst to 2.4 - $90 - GA-J1900N-D3V - BIOS boot battles - I get that on about all boards though! - RTL8111G NICs - only 1/2 mPCI-e slot for wifi, can add a third LAN with slotted nic in PCI slot - 66MHZ bandwidth tops!! Dont try a dual headed NIC. Appears to run a bit warm at 52 degrees Celsius - 13 watts
3. The J1900 Intel Family - $180 - Supermicro X10SBA - smoother BIOS/config boots, upgraded 1xPCI-e (x2) full slot that could take a dual headed GigE - onboard Intel I210 chip GigE nics - upgraded 4x SATA3 internal headers (say NAS). Added full size mSATA slot for a SSD boot chip. is it worth the extra $90? Intel chip premium 30 bucks granted, full size mSATA slot maybe $10, PCI-e x2 full slot definetly make the delta even at $90. SuperMicro name and reputation - icing on the cake!
Onboard 4 GigE Nics and horsepower for above 500mb/s throughput with more than 10 users.
4. The Intel Avoton / Rangeley family - double the cores and double the smart Cache same cpu speed as J1900. Server class ECC memory. Double to triple the price. Quad GigE LANs plus iPMI management port make up the $ difference. RAM capacities go up 4-8 times. Super value in the Enterprise class with client counts in above 75 range and inter LAN routing in the above 500Mb/sec range. Likely burn at 21-23 watts.
SuperMicro A1SRi-2758 - $333
SuprMicro A1SAi-2750F-O - $375 -
Gigabyte GA-9SISL - $449
ASRock only 2 GigE lans tons of SATA3 (say NAS) - C2750D4 - $380Onboard Greater than 4:
5. SuperMicro A1SRM-LN7F-2758 - 7 Onboard Intel flavored GigE RJ45 nics + iPMI - Rangeley C2758 - $436 Amazon Yes - Will be in great demand!!
Another Attempt at home in the quest - Gigabyte GA-H97N-WIFI - no go - LAN2 onboard is Atheros 8161 Wifi is Intel Wireless-AC 7260 and both appear as dead nics for FreeBSD!! pfSense 2.2 RC x64 crashed big time after addition of only pfBlocker, CPU-G3258, single 8GB DDR3 ram.
-
This post is deleted!