X11SBA-LN4F vs A1SRi-2558F

Engineer

Your board is $300 on Amazon.

This:

http://store.netgate.com/ADI/RCC-VE-4860-board.aspx and is priced at $406.

but it has:
More clockspeed (2.5GHz .vs 1.6Ghz on your board)
8GB ram (your board has 0)
8GB (at least, new ones will be more) storage (emmc) on-board (your board has 0)
More Ethernets (6 .vs 4)
Better Ethernet (4 are i350, 2 are i210, your board has 4 i210)
You'll need an ATX power supply to power your board. The 4860 runs on a simple 12VDC barrel connector.

My board cost $216 shipped from Comp Source. I paid less than about $305 for everything in it. I get it - you don't like this damn board and that's your choice. Right now, I don't like it either (because it doesn't work properly) but I have it and am trying to get it to work. Why do you have a hard on over this issue? If this is the way the admin is going to act on this site, I can see why the 'other' folks felt a need to fork off and go a 'different' direction.

@BlueKobold:

And on top it comes together with 1x mSATA and 2x miniPCIe + SIM slots and yours only with 1x Mini-PCIe slot.

That's nice and all….but I need these why?

divsys

If this is the way the admin is going to act on this site, I can see why the 'other' folks felt a need to fork off and go a 'different' direction.

Just to be clear - the user "BlueKobold" is NOT an Admin/Supervisor/Sysop or any other figure of "authority" any more than I am (as far as I know anyway).

Many (most?) of us on this Forum are unpaid volunteers who happen to have invested time and effort into making pfSense what it is today IMHO - YMMV.

Some have better or worse people/language/bedside manners than others.
Many have pet peeves, techniques that should "ALWAYS" be used, others that should "NEVER" be used and everything in between.

As always they are (mostly) opinions, and like a**holes - everyones' got one ::)

Remember - it takes all of us to make a planet - and its the only one we've got (so far).

Just my $0.02

jwt

@Engineer:

My board cost $216 shipped from Comp Source.

Seems to be $228.33 here:

http://www.compsource.com/pn/MBDX11SBALN4FO/Supermicro-428/X11sbaLn4f-N3700-Fcbga-Pentium–Max8gb-Ddr3-MiniItx-MBDX11SBALN4FO-MBDX11SBALN4FO/

@Engineer:

I paid less than about $305 for everything in it.

So you've got $77 to spend for ram, disk, etc.

Now, what is your time worth?

Moreover, what am I to do with the negative reputation you're heaping on pfSense because you're attempting to run it on inferior platforms?

Engineer

@jwt:

Moreover, what am I to do with the negative reputation you're heaping on pfSense because you're attempting to run it on inferior platforms?

You show me where I'm giving a negative reputation to pfSense! I've clearly stated that I think this is a hardware issue or driver / BIOS issue at this point. As far as I'm concerned, you can go screw yourself you self absorbed prick. pfSense may be fine, but if you're the face of it or behind any of it, I don't want any part of it.

As far as my time, I did this as a project, not because I NEEDED it. My $99 Asus router works fine but I've heard so many good things about pfSense that I wanted to build a low power, future proof PC based router. Why do you give a care about what I do with my spare time? It's mine, not yours.

Oh, and here's the $216 link since you seem so hellbent against anything to do with me or this board:

http://www.compsource.com/ttechnote.asp?part_no=MBDX11SBALN4FO&vid=428&src=F

That's nice and all….but I need these why?

I have not told anything about you need it! And I only wrote it because the both boards were compared in price
against each other and I was only thinking that the 2 more miniPCIe slots and the SIM slots would
not be soldered on the board with no cost or for nothing of cost.

Just to be clear - the user "BlueKobold" is NOT an Admin/Supervisor/Sysop or any other figure of "authority" any more than I am (as far as I know anyway).

This was written under the Quote from jwt and not under mine, and what we others all are is written under
our names on the left side.

I am out of this thread now, it sounds to strange to me.

Derelict

@Engineer:

Oh, and here's the $216 link since you seem so hellbent against anything to do with me or this board:

http://www.compsource.com/ttechnote.asp?part_no=MBDX11SBALN4FO&vid=428&src=F

Looks like a $228 link.

Engineer

@Derelict:

@Engineer:

Oh, and here's the $216 link since you seem so hellbent against anything to do with me or this board:

http://www.compsource.com/ttechnote.asp?part_no=MBDX11SBALN4FO&vid=428&src=F

Looks like a $228 link.

The search through Google for "Supermicro N3700" and then click on the Shopping link.

or

www.froogle.com and enter "Supermicro N3700" (no quotes). Look for $216.10 price.

Compsource.jpg_thumb

Jailer

@jwt:

You'll need an ATX power supply to power your board.

Key Features
1. Intel Pentium Processor N3700,
Socket FCBGA 1170; CPU 6W
~snip~
11. 12V DC or ATX

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/X11/X11SBA-LN4F.cfm

Jailer

@Engineer:

@Derelict:

@Engineer:

Oh, and here's the $216 link since you seem so hellbent against anything to do with me or this board:

http://www.compsource.com/ttechnote.asp?part_no=MBDX11SBALN4FO&vid=428&src=F

Looks like a $228 link.

The search through Google for "Supermicro N3700" and then click on the Shopping link.

You must have a coupon code or some other promotional offer saved. There is a small "11% off" tag that displays in the screenshot you posted that is not there when others (myself included) click on the posted link.

Care to share the discount code? ;D

jjduru

@jwt:

@Engineer:

My board cost $216 shipped from Comp Source.

Seems to be $228.33 here:

http://www.compsource.com/pn/MBDX11SBALN4FO/Supermicro-428/X11sbaLn4f-N3700-Fcbga-Pentium–Max8gb-Ddr3-MiniItx-MBDX11SBALN4FO-MBDX11SBALN4FO/

@Engineer:

I paid less than about $305 for everything in it.

So you've got $77 to spend for ram, disk, etc.

Now, what is your time worth?

Moreover, what am I to do with the negative reputation you're heaping on pfSense because you're attempting to run it on inferior platforms?

Somebody definitely pissed in your Cheerios bowl yesterday…

You should applaud the time and effort Engineer put into making this board work, yet all you can come up with is some undeserved negativism.

reilos

@Engineer:

To anyone who is interested in this board and the progress on it, please PM me. I'll keep you updated via PM. It's obvious that some of the people, including the powers to be, have an issue with it and/or this posting. I'll no longer update the status in this thead

Please don't let some smart-ass response leave you with such negativity. I've been following this thread very closely, since i was on a quest to build my own pfsense box, and i think you are doing great in contributing to this community with your effort to resolve this issue. Thanks for that.

Engineer

I've decided to update this thread because of lots of interest in this board.

After sending the board out via RMA to SuperMicro, they kept it for about 3 weeks or so and ran the tests that I had used to trigger the watchdog timeout. The engineering team came back and said that they had found the issue and had made a hardware change to my board. I have tried to get a better explanation as to whether this was a defect on my board only or ALL of these board but have received nothing back yet.

With that in mind, I tested the board for four days using Ubuntu 15.04 (was still on my drive). Previously, it would not run for more than 30 hours with going down. After the four day test, I installed pfsense and ran the same test. It has been running for two days with no issue so far. I'm not running a WAN but that doesn't matter as I was able to get it to crash previously without a WAN port simply by bombarding it with LAN traffic.

If anyone has any specific questions, I'll try to answer. If the board will run for seven (7) days without crashing the ports, I'll move it back into full WAN service.

jjduru

Much appreciated update.

On a side note, I cannot stop myself wondering what https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?action=profile;u=273195 is going to say about this.

Jailer

Thanks for the update! ;)

jwt

@jjduru:

On a side note, I cannot stop myself wondering what https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?action=profile;u=273195 is going to say about this.

Me, either.

Engineer

Have just moved this back into full service (WAN) and am running off of it since it made it 8 days (4 on Ubuntu and 4 on pfsense 2.2.5/FreeBSD) without a network going down issue. I'll keep people informed and answer questions that I can. Also enabled TRIM for the first time (finally).

Thanks for the help everyone and Merry Christmas! :)

Engineer

Currently at 4+ days on pfsense 2.2.5 / FreeBSD 10.1 without the LAN going down / Watchdog. I think it would be fair to say that this issue has been solved for my board. Now whether SuperMicro has to change other boards or BIOS is anyone's guess right now as I have no feedback from them yet.

bluepr0

Thanks for all the info!

I was wondering how it performs your board when under heavy usage and adding snort, ntopng,etc. I'm currently using a Mac Mini (late 2012) with pfSense and when using all my internet (around 200/20) the CPU usage gets around 40%). My CPU is a i5-3210M, looking at cpubenchmarks website it seems it got around the double of performance of yours… so that would mean (more or less) that when getting 200mbps from the router you should see an usage of around 80%.

Do you have any numbers on this? thanks!

Engineer

bluepr0, sorry, I don't. I looked at your specs and your processor is a dual core with hyperthreading while this one is a slower quad core processor. Your CPU load number seem higher than I would have expected thinking that your processor should handle higher speeds at lower CPU load. I'm not experienced enough yet to say that though…just a guess on my part.

Are both of your cores pulling 40% at that time or is only one core pulling 40%? When simply pinging in and out, the average was 6Mbps in / out and I never saw any core above 4% load with all three other cores running 100% idle (using command top -S -H from the shell or from the command prompt). But, I have not other packages running and am running basic, slow (compared to yours) internet. Was trying to build a low power, somewhat future proof unit that could handle up to 1Gbps including encryption (AES-NI) in the future. Your numbers make me second guess my choice and think that I may have overestimated this board. sigh

Edit: After reading a bit, it seems it doesn't take much (relatively) to run a 1Gbps plain connection but adding SNORT, etc. is where much more processor power is needed to pump data through. SNORT is single threaded so it would eat up much more of a single CPU core (I did read you can run multiple copies of SNORT and load balance it out but it was much more difficult to do so).

bluepr0

I ran again the tests, using top command to see the CPU usage (it seems the CPU usage on web interface is also accurate, making an average of all the cores or am I wrong?)

Here's the screenshots

1. This is using all my download bandwidth from the internet http://d.pr/i/1h6X9/3UOn6rvy
CPU usage is around 30% here

2. This is using all my download bandwidth from internet + iperf (maxing out gigabit) http://d.pr/i/1bL1T/5PWn64bR
CPU usage is around 84% here

What do you think?

Thanks!