Custom Router, possibly 1u capable of serving VPN @ 100mbit+

[krs360]

Hello boys and girls,

I've always been a fan of using my own networking solutions, infact I used to run my old fibre connection from a Raspberry PI, think it was good for speeds to about 30mbit but these days it's not an option with higher speeds. Adding to this having it connect to a VPN has further speed implications. I am currently using a Netgear R7000 with the tomato firmware, however VPN speed does not get above 30mbit/s.

I have two old rackmount servers in storage, however they were from a datacentre and the fans on them are nuts, probably like 11k RPM or something. Not ideal unless you have a dedicated area/networking room cupboard. I have seen some 1u options on the chinese website, however most of which use non AES-NI CPUS which I think will be required for pfsense 2.5 and beyond.

I do have an old school PC I can use but it seems to be power hungry as well, think I worked it out would cost somewhere in the region of £250 per year in electricity cost alone, assuming nothing fails on me.

With a half decent server I guess I could run a Hypervisor and virtual machines for Pfsense & other projects.

Cheers =).

 

[WJA96]

Whatever you get is always going to be a balancing act between power, power consumption, cost and noise.

There are 2U silent server cases which are effectively massive aluminium heat sinks with a server inside but they’re £400 just for the case.

And anything decent from Supermicro (which is what most of the custom pfSense etc. Boxes are based on) are not cheap and not quiet.

I have a Beta Unifi Application Server (Supermicro X10SDV-4C-TLN2F with Xeon D 2.4GHz Quad-Core) and that’s specced to do exactly what you want but it’s going to be £2000 retail when it goes on general release. And when it’s running flat out it’s almost loud enough to trigger our Health & Safety policy regarding long-term noise exposure. I would have thought most Xeon D servers would do what you want. But again, it won’t be cheap.

 

[BigT]

If you can relax the rack mount requirement then low power options to consider (assuming pfSense):

• Netgate’s own appliances optimised for it
• Amazon now have some micro chassis PCs with 6 Ethernet ports and an AES-NI compatible CPU for about £300
• An HP microserver with some extra intel NICs that you could use for routing and other projects, particularly if virtualizing

I don’t know much about it but I believe for a non-pfSense based solution there is a cheap Mikrotik router that’s good for up to 300Mbps VPN. Search on here to find threads about it.