Untangle

Mikey · 22 Mar 2020 at 09:27

Many untangle users here, used pfsense and Unifi recently and pfsense all day long over unifi, but like the reporting of the Untangle. Briefly tried untangle as a VM, but would get a cheap AMD Athlon 200ge build together. Got a number of dual and quad port NICs lying around.

Untangle unit, I'd prob add 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD

Deleted member 77746 · 22 Mar 2020 at 15:00

Nice. Is there a question here somewhere?

Mikey · 22 Mar 2020 at 15:27

mrbell1984 said:
Nice. Is there a question here somewhere?

Anyone using it...

Avalon · 22 Mar 2020 at 18:19

Yes (though it changes regularly). Hardware wise without knowing what you intend to do, your hardware seems like potential overkill... then again I was running a R210-II (Xeon 1270/8GB/120GB) till I downsized to an Zotac SFF (i3 7100u/16GB/120GB). My connection is relatively slow (210/35ish) and my usual load relatively light with a few VLAN's and VPN tunnels. If I had symmetrical gigabit, i'd likely go intel NIC's for the hardware offload and focus on what protocol I wanted to use for VPN encryption.

Mikey · 22 Mar 2020 at 19:16

Avalon said:
Yes (though it changes regularly). Hardware wise without knowing what you intend to do, your hardware seems like potential overkill... then again I was running a R210-II (Xeon 1270/8GB/120GB) till I downsized to an Zotac SFF (i3 7100u/16GB/120GB). My connection is relatively slow (210/35ish) and my usual load relatively light with a few VLAN's and VPN tunnels. If I had symmetrical gigabit, i'd likely go intel NIC's for the hardware offload and focus on what protocol I wanted to use for VPN encryption.

I agree prob overkill, but when I haven't got spare kit with the exception of DDR4 RAM and SATA disks, the AMD solution looks good value. CPU + HSF, ITX, case, motherboard

apachegoose · 22 Mar 2020 at 20:37

If you are buying new hardware look at the Shuttle DS10U. They are a semi-industrial tiny computer with duel intel nic's, 2 DDR4 slots and a M2 slot. The version with a Celeron 4205U was selling for £240, but unsurprisingly has sold out everywhere due to high demand, there are versions with an I3, I5 and I7 CPU so you can buy as per your needs but the price jumps significantly.

Avalon · 23 Mar 2020 at 00:08

apachegoose said:
If you are buying new hardware look at the Shuttle DS10U. They are a semi-industrial tiny computer with duel intel nic's, 2 DDR4 slots and a M2 slot. The version with a Celeron 4205U was selling for £240, but unsurprisingly has sold out everywhere due to high demand, there are versions with an I3, I5 and I7 CPU so you can buy as per your needs but the price jumps significantly.

The issue with the DS10U is the Celeron is potentially a little anaemic for anything CPU intensive/not supported in hardware (depending what you end up running), and it's not available, if/when eventually it is, it'll likely be at a higher price. While the Zotac stuff is dual Realtek and if you're running symmetrical gigabit flat out it'll not able to do the same raw numbers under some OS' that intel will, under BSD you only need to compile the later driver and it plays nicely, or as Untangle isn't BSD based, it's OK OoTB. £100 gets you a used ex Datto i3 7100u with dual NIC and £20-40 gets you 8-16GB DDR4 SO-DIMM, chuck in an old SSD and you've got a reasonably powerful, power efficient routing platform that has 1.8x the CPU mark for half the price of the bare Shuttle. The op's 200ge is circa 2.8x the CPU mark, he has RAM/SSD/intel 2T/4T NIC's kicking about, CPU is £43, it's £90 for a new ITX board and £45 for a Silverstone ITX case and then a not awful ATX PSU is going to be way under £62 which is what's left vs a bare DS10U (that isn't available), you can see why the DS10U is probably not a great shout relative to other options. One of the better known Chinese vendors like Qotom can likely do something similar for that budget, but good luck getting it here at present.

WJA96 · 23 Mar 2020 at 04:49

A Celeron is PLENTY for Untangle, so long as you have at least 4Gb RAM. Untangle’s own 200-user main office units are Celerons with 2-8Gb RAM and they’re fine. What does seem to be vital for snappy performance is a good SSD drive. One thing to be aware of is that Untangle 14 cannot boot from a UEFI bios. It has to boot off the legacy BIOS and anything NVME based for the boot drive is basically a non-starter. I haven’t personally tried it, but hopefully Untangle 15 (Debian 4.9 kernel) should boot off an NVME drive.

Avalon · 23 Mar 2020 at 12:13

C’mon, we both know even Untangle make the point that the quad core celeron craps our at 500Mbit with basic filtering/AV/IPS/reporting and if you’re throwing hundreds at hardware, you aren’t usually going to run a UTM device without making use of the UTM features. We also live in a world where gigabit and greater FTTP/Cable is available from a number of providers and it’s availability is increasing daily. Advocating for a Celeron at this stage at least deserves a caveat to that affect.

Kol · 23 Mar 2020 at 13:46

Jumping on board, I'm considering switch from USG, but I don't fancy another box using far too much power. Any small footprint devices with a low power consumption suitable for untangle recommendations?

WJA96 · 23 Mar 2020 at 13:52

Avalon said:
C’mon, we both know even Untangle make the point that the quad core celeron craps our at 500Mbit with basic filtering/AV/IPS/reporting and if you’re throwing hundreds at hardware, you aren’t usually going to run a UTM device without making use of the UTM features. We also live in a world where gigabit and greater FTTP/Cable is available from a number of providers and it’s availability is increasing daily. Advocating for a Celeron at this stage at least deserves a caveat to that affect.

Yes, no and sort of. Firstly, there are Celerons and there are Celerons. And Untangle is threaded so a dual core 4 thread can process 4 streams at, say, 250Mbps and that will fill your 1Gbps pipe. Or two threads at 500Mbps will also fill the pipe. I’m not sure what use you would have (apart from a Speed Test) that a modern Celeron based system couldn’t handle, simply because no one user is going to be filling the 1Gbps pipe.

Indeed, many of our systems are Atom based because the 8-core Atom is very good at slicing down the throughput streams and parallel processing them.

Armageus · 23 Mar 2020 at 13:59

We're running at work purely to serve a decent Captive portal for our short-term wifi users. Runs happily as a Hyper-V VM, with several virtual network cards set up.

Avalon · 23 Mar 2020 at 14:12

WJA96 said:
Yes, no and sort of. Firstly, there are Celerons and there are Celerons. And Untangle is threaded so a dual core 4 thread can process 4 streams at, say, 250Mbps and that will fill your 1Gbps pipe. Or two threads at 500Mbps will also fill the pipe. I’m not sure what use you would have (apart from a Speed Test) that a modern Celeron based system couldn’t handle, simply because no one user is going to be filling the 1Gbps pipe.

Indeed, many of our systems are Atom based because the 8-core Atom is very good at slicing down the throughput streams and parallel processing them.

The 4205u being discussed is only dual core with no HT, so 500Mbit is probably optimistic, also maxing out gigabit WAN isn't as difficult or unusual as you suggest, once you reach a certain point, cloud storage and local mechanical storage aren't really that different to an end user unless its latency sensitive.

Kol said:
Jumping on board, I'm considering switch from USG, but I don't fancy another box using far too much power. Any small footprint devices with a low power consumption suitable for untangle recommendations?

If used is an option, the dual NIC zotac's mentioned above are still available on ebay for £100ish, the i3 7100U copes quite nicely, the Realtek NIC's lack the hardware offload/driver stability of intel, but with the later driver under BSD it's stable and Untangle works quite nicely on them OOTB, but if we're talking raw numbers, intel will win. An intel NUC plus the Amazon basics USB3 NIC also works surprisingly well under BSD, obviously that opens up a few other options.

Armageus said:
We're running at work purely to serve a decent Captive portal for our short-term wifi users. Runs happily as a Hyper-V VM, with several virtual network cards set up.

Didn't you mention this in another thread saying you were using the 'free version', do Untangle offer free use licences for commercial purposes or did I misunderstand?

Armageus · 23 Mar 2020 at 14:49

Avalon said:
Didn't you mention this in another thread saying you were using the 'free version', do Untangle offer free use licences for commercial purposes or did I misunderstand?

I'm not aware of anything that says the free version can't be used in a commercial environment

Caged · 23 Mar 2020 at 15:13

Thanks for mentioning Untangle again, I've never been that impressed with the UTM product but the new SD WAN thing they have looks interesting.

Kol · 23 Mar 2020 at 17:20

Avalon said:
If used is an option, the dual NIC zotac's mentioned above are still available on ebay for £100ish, the i3 7100U copes quite nicely, the Realtek NIC's lack the hardware offload/driver stability of intel, but with the later driver under BSD it's stable and Untangle works quite nicely on them OOTB, but if we're talking raw numbers, intel will win. An intel NUC plus the Amazon basics USB3 NIC also works surprisingly well under BSD, obviously that opens up a few other options.

Thanks bud. I shall take a look.

Mikey · 24 Mar 2020 at 10:20

Well time to build a list of components and see what the costs come out at in excel