Build Pfsense router

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.
 
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!
 
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!
 
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.
 
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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'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).
 
shaf said:
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).
Click to expand...

Could you specify which Zotac itx board model (and CPU) and do you use wifi card?

thanks :)
 
I bought this Zotac board (a number of years ago mind you) which has an integrated atom CPU and wifi (don't use it though),

Zotac IONITX F-E Ion N330 Motherboard
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.

Ice_Black said:
My budget is around £150-£200

Yes for home use, I have a BT Hub and a plusnet router.
Click to expand...

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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