Installation on a laptop

thinair

I've been looking for a quiet and cheap solution for a pfsense box. I have an old IBM T20 laptop (P3 700MHz, 384MB RAM, 20GB drive) with a failed LCD lying around (they're also available on ebay for under $100), so I decided to try it out. I inserted a 3com PCMCIA NIC and D-Link PCMCIA wireless NIC into the laptop, installed pfsense box to the harddrive and it works flawlessly. It's dead silent, consumes 14W when idling, and allows me to still use packages (ntop is all I really use), and if I insert a battery it's its own UPS :)

I'm eventually going to do some throughput testing and see how it works out.

hoba

Nice :D

I just installed it on a similar box, IBM p3 something, i get somewhere around 1.3MB/sec without the laptop pfsense i get 8MB/sec
i´m also using a extra pcmcia nic and a wireless
while i´m downloading a large file it´s impossible to do anything else on the pfsense trough shell…seems to take all performance that (slow) dl.

any idea what could cause this?, the extra nic is a 10/100 3com Megahertz.

how is your speed?

@thinair:

I've been looking for a quiet and cheap solution for a pfsense box. I have an old IBM T20 laptop (P3 700MHz, 384MB RAM, 20GB drive) with a failed LCD lying around (they're also available on ebay for under $100), so I decided to try it out. I inserted a 3com PCMCIA NIC and D-Link PCMCIA wireless NIC into the laptop, installed pfsense box to the harddrive and it works flawlessly. It's dead silent, consumes 14W when idling, and allows me to still use packages (ntop is all I really use), and if I insert a battery it's its own UPS :)

I'm eventually going to do some throughput testing and see how it works out.

jahonix

I seem to remember having read about slowness issues with 3com PCMCIA NICs in this very forum.
Maybe a search can reveal this further.

Are there any limitations with the pcmcia bus?

/f

thinair

I tried a couple quick tests yesterday, my interfaces are as follows:
3com PCMCIA WAN
onboard Intel LAN
D-Link PCMCIA WIFI

From WIFI to LAN I max out at 22Mb/s, which is pretty close to the max throughput of a 802.11g network.
From LAN to WAN I can get at least 5.2Mb/s, because that's the speed of my internet conenction, I haven't tried putting another computer on the WAN side to run a throughput test. I'll try it later today if I have some time.

My only real complaint so far is that either the 3com or intel NIC don't support ALTQ for traffic shaping.