Build Pfsense router
- Thread starter Ice_Black
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Not sure what Pfsense is, but here is a spec.
YOUR BASKET
1 x Gigabyte H77N-WIFI Intel H77 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Mini ITX Motherboard £89.99
1 x Akasa Crypto Mini-ITX Case with 60W PSU - Black £59.99
1 x Crucial V4 32GB 2.5" SATA-II Solid State Hard Drive £43.99
1 x Corsair Value 2GB (1x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 1333MHz Low-Voltage Single Channel Module (VS2GB1333D3) £14.99
Total : £220.36 (includes shipping : £9.50).
The SSD is the component that takes the most (needless) expense to be honest! If you can, I'd boot off a USB stick or find an old hard drive and use that.
YOUR BASKET
1 x Gigabyte H77N-WIFI Intel H77 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Mini ITX Motherboard £89.99
1 x Akasa Crypto Mini-ITX Case with 60W PSU - Black £59.99
1 x Crucial V4 32GB 2.5" SATA-II Solid State Hard Drive £43.99
1 x Corsair Value 2GB (1x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 1333MHz Low-Voltage Single Channel Module (VS2GB1333D3) £14.99
Total : £220.36 (includes shipping : £9.50).
The SSD is the component that takes the most (needless) expense to be honest! If you can, I'd boot off a USB stick or find an old hard drive and use that.
Any particular reason for pfSense over a decent router like the asus? You are probably better looking for an atom motherboard with 2 ethernet ports or add a PCI card.Look second hand for an atom as everything is either going to be very expensive or high power and loud! I have run pfSense on various things for testing and it runs fine on a little dual core atom. I have also had it running under a virtual machine which allowed me to play around with some other machines.
Also be careful about ethernet ports and wifi chips as pfSense doesn't have support for everything!
Also be careful about ethernet ports and wifi chips as pfSense doesn't have support for everything!
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Yeah I have no idea what Pfsense does or anything - it sounds like a job for someone who knows what they are talking about 
its a free router OS based on freeBSD. It has some very powerful enterprise features, however it works quite nicely on all manor of machines. Its a popular project for playing around with an old hardware. It also has a package manager so you can install all sorts of things from caching, anti-virus, VPN etc.
Well worth a look if your interesting in those kind of things!
Well worth a look if your interesting in those kind of things!
I hate to say it but OCUK don't really stock the parts to match your specification for a pfSense build. Look for an itx board with an Intel NIC ( 2 or you'll have to add a network card) pfSense doesn't always play to well with the Realtek. Then stick as much RAM in as specified by the pfSense site for your throughput. Then add a case and power supply and a HDD big enough for caching if thats what you want to achieve.
I have the following setup for my pfSense, which I run 2.0.2 x64 on.
Intel DQ77KB + Dell Laptop PSU
4Gb RAM DDR3
Intel Pentium G630
Intel 525 30Gb SSD mSATA
Intel Dual Nic ET Card
Lian Li PC-Q3
I have no problems with passing around a 1Gb of throughput across it.
Intel DQ77KB + Dell Laptop PSU
4Gb RAM DDR3
Intel Pentium G630
Intel 525 30Gb SSD mSATA
Intel Dual Nic ET Card
Lian Li PC-Q3
I have no problems with passing around a 1Gb of throughput across it.
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Soldato
Have a look at the Gigabyte GA-C847N: embedded Sandy Bridge Celeron and dual gigabit LAN.
http://uk.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4419
Does appear to be Realtek LAN though.
£65 from a competitor, however I have put in a product suggestion to OcUK to try some of these NM70 mobos.
http://uk.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4419
Does appear to be Realtek LAN though.
£65 from a competitor, however I have put in a product suggestion to OcUK to try some of these NM70 mobos.
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Is it really worth the spend over a normal router?
The Intel DQ77KB is as close to perfect as I can imagine for this. Intel nics are consistently recommended over realtek. The board costs slightly over £100, which is not particularly cheap. The built in power supply helps offset the cost somewhat.
I like the Akasa Euler case, but believe it conflicts with your wifi requirement in that a wifi card in a solid aluminium block is unlikely to work well.
Whether it's worth the price above a normal router depends pretty much on what you'd like to do with it. I'm putting off building a *nix based router primarily because I can't think of a good answer to "what could it do, that a normal router wont".
I like the Akasa Euler case, but believe it conflicts with your wifi requirement in that a wifi card in a solid aluminium block is unlikely to work well.
Whether it's worth the price above a normal router depends pretty much on what you'd like to do with it. I'm putting off building a *nix based router primarily because I can't think of a good answer to "what could it do, that a normal router wont".
I've been running pfsense router for a number of years now. I only use a fraction of the features but what it gives me is solid performance. I don't have to reboot it because it has stopped working, it does not lock up and up-time is usually months.
The normal routers I've had before this were a pain.
I bought a Zotac itx board with a pcie slot so I could fit an Intel dual/quad Nic (you can pick these up on ebay).
The normal routers I've had before this were a pain.
I bought a Zotac itx board with a pcie slot so I could fit an Intel dual/quad Nic (you can pick these up on ebay).
Zotac are an unusual choice if the goal is reliability. A good off the shelf router should be as robust as pfsense, but I absolutely agree that the worse ones fall over all the time.
Have you come up with any interesting tasks for it to do? My list is firewall / NAT / dhcp / dns / QOS ... which almost any router will do.
Have you come up with any interesting tasks for it to do? My list is firewall / NAT / dhcp / dns / QOS ... which almost any router will do.
I'm not familiar with Zotacs reliability problems - I needed an itx board with pcie slot and this was the one available at the time. it's been solid for me so far. 
I only use a fraction of the features as said before. I did have Dual WAN setup for a while with Virgin and O2 which it handled quite easily.
I only use a fraction of the features as said before. I did have Dual WAN setup for a while with Virgin and O2 which it handled quite easily.
Could always go the microserver route add an Intel CT Adapter and you are good to go. I went 2008 with untangle in a VM. I use the Microserver as a PVR recording TV from 4 tuners, along with Untangle and a file server so it would be usefull to you fully loaded 45w.
You can pick a microserver up for around £100 ish second-hand. They may even put them back on offer sometime. If you want to go above 60Mbps download through Untangle in a VM is at max CPU. Pfsense has less overhead unless even with squid and snort. If you want later 100Mbps down you might need to go bare metal install.
You will not want these after install of pfsense or untangle, but you could use them as an access point for wireless.
You can pick a microserver up for around £100 ish second-hand. They may even put them back on offer sometime. If you want to go above 60Mbps download through Untangle in a VM is at max CPU. Pfsense has less overhead unless even with squid and snort. If you want later 100Mbps down you might need to go bare metal install.
You will not want these after install of pfsense or untangle, but you could use them as an access point for wireless.
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