Dell poweredge sc1435

stephend2

We're looking for some brand new hardware to run pfsense on.. I know throughput should not be a problem on this box, just worried about hardware compatibility.

Module Description Show Details
PowerEdge SC1435 Dual Core AMD Opteron 2212; 2.0GHz,2X1MB Cache,1Ghz HyperTransport
Operating System No Operating System
2nd Processor FREE SECOND PROCESSOR! Dual Core AMD Opteron 2212, 2x1MB Cache, 2.0GH
Memory 2GB, 667MHz, 4x512MB Single Ranked DIMMs
TCP/IP Offload Engine Enablement Broadcom Dual Port TCP/IP Offload Engine Not Enabled
PCI Riser Riser with 1 PCIe Slot
1st Hard Drive 80GB 7.2K RPM Serial ATA 3Gbps 3.5-in Cabled Hard Drive
Primary Controller Onboard SATA Controller - No RAID
Network Adapters On-Board Dual Port Gigabit Network Adapter, No TOE
CD/DVD Drive 24X IDE CD-RW/DVD ROM Drive

I'm not clear on what brand the onboard nics are, wondering if anyone has experienced these yet. I'm doing this for an apartment complex providing internet to their residents. current pipe is 4.5mb…3 t1s with the possibility of up to 45mb in the future. ISP provides their router, we have a routable class c from them. I'm wanting to put the pfsense box in as a bridge, and do protocol filtering, qos and firewalling with it. right now I have an old pc running untangle, which I am completely irritated with..dhcp service wont even stay running on it more than a day, although the rest of it does fine.

owners are ready to purchase the hardware and they prefer dell as they have a corporate account with them.
I'm wanting to get 2 of these 1u machines, the other is going to have 2x 250GB drives in it and will be a winblows server for a lot of management stuff. I'm actually needing to seek some advice on other things out here too...I'm quite fluent on small networks...but I've almost gotten in over my head out here a couple times. got quite a deal on some allied telesyn 24 port layer 3 switches on ebay...30 of them for $5 each + shipping. They should be on a truck on the way to us now. we've got a mixture of single mode and multimode fiber out to every building. actually theres single mode everywhere except one building. theres going to be 3 switches at each building, 2 of which are going to go to the ethernet jacks in apartments. The 3rd switch is going to be spare ports/security cameras. I'm not exactly straight on how to configure the vlans so we have the public network for the residents, and a private network for management/security. All this needs to pass over the same fiber link back to the office. we are giving the residents public addresses that they are free to do as they please with, just blocking netbios and a few other things.

Sorry thats kind of long winded...I'm really needing to know about the dell hardware before getting them to order something thats not even going to run pfsense right.. Also if theres anything stopping qos or any other needed function from working when acting as a bridge, would be good to know so I can rethink some plans. qos is a must out here, with over 100 users, most of which have several computers behind a router and only 4.5mb of bandwidth.

Cry Havok

They're Broadcom NICs (as stated in the tiny snippet you posted). That by itself however isn't enough to say if they'll work with pfSense.

A search for "dell sc1435 freebsd" provides a number of hits that may be of use to you. At least one suggests that i386 doesn't work, which if true means that pfSense won't work.

stephend2

alright, tell me if you're seeing something I'm not…but looks like back in dec. 06 people were getting the 6.2-rc1 i386 kernel running on these boxes..so it should work.? another thing..is it even feasible to run the amd64 kernel with pfsense, or would that just break everything?

stephend2

also, intel pro 1000pt dual port gigabit nic…so far I've read that intel is the way to go, would this one be a good choice?

Cry Havok

I didn't go looking in any depth - I don't have one and have no personal interest in whether or not it works with FreeBSD/pfSense ;)

As for the cards, you want to buy the server cards if you can - there is a world of difference between the server grade cards and the desktop cards in terms of system load.