Building a router Pfsense or similar

[Somersetlife]

Hello my situation is this
I'm getting through routers over the years at approx 1 every 12-18 months, it's not power surges, they seem to overheat and eventually die- last being DSL AC 68u Asus who 8 months in gave me an email to take to supplier for a refund- so much for three years warranty.

I currently have a server and constant traffic on my network, I believe this is what is shortening the lifespan of vdsl2 routers as they are not stuffed in a cabinet and are in cool and low dust room

My server is a linux LAMP server on a HP media smart EX490 which has faithfully run for years.

I'm looking at either building a pfsense router ( yes I have seen the PC engine boards and no I don't want one) looking at 2ghz duel core minimum and plenty of 1600mhz ram
(worst case al dell optiplex with duel intel nic)

I'm also considering running a virtual router on a new server.

My consideration is cost and running costs

 

[L&LD]

You may want to look at sfx2000' thread where he talks in detail about a similar setup.

 

[Somersetlife]

You may want to look at sfx2000' thread where he talks in detail about a similar setup.

Hi, thank you for reply, I will look at your suggestion as it sounds like sfx2000 has been down the road I now am looking at.

 

[M.G.]

I have been using pfSense for many years in Virtual Machines with zero problems/issues. Though I've never installed it natively on a Physical Machine. The overhead of pfSense is minimal, both in terms of any impact on network throughput and also in terms of memory and CPU footprint. Over the years, the VMs have been hosted on Windows and Linux over VirtualBox; on a Mac Mini overr VMWare Fusion, and for a short time on native VMWare EXSi.

There are multiple installation/setup videos available on the web, decent free documentation, or the pfSense people have a book for sale (though I never needed it). It's easiest/best if your server has 2 (or more) NICs: one assigned to the WAN and the other to the LAN (to which you point your server's LAN-side.

 

[sfx2000]

pfSense, along with a managed switch (Netgear GS-108T for example) is a very powerful solution - not for the timid, but for anyone that has a good understanding of networking and routing specifically, it is a compelling solution for any small business level network.

I'm running pfSense on a dedicated box - Netgate's RCE-V2440, pretty much tailor made for pfSense (same exact HW as the pfSense branded SG-2440) - it's a bit spendy but I've been happy with it so far..

(running pfSense in a VM - the pfSense community actively discourages this, but it does run - the FreeBSD kernel they use is fairly tweaked for pfSense, and runs best on bare metal)

 

[sfx2000]

on a Mac Mini overr VMWare Fusion,

Most folks miss that a Mac Mini running OSX is a powerful little routing platform in it's own - there's FreeBSD under all that shiny GUI stuff, and it's a full blown unix machine - add a thunderbolt GigE adapter (30 bucks) and dive under the hood...

(of course, there is the cost of the Mini, but if one already owns a Mini...)

Don't even need server.app for basic stuff, but it's a pretty good value at $20.00 - adds a lot of things that make life easier for a small business network (email, vpn, directory services, web server, wiki, etc...) - and plays fine with Macs, Linux, and Windows clients.

probably the best 20 dollar server out there

 

[Wolf_666]

My suggestion is to build the pfSense box around Intel C2558/C2758 SoC or buy the box directly from pfSense, depends on your loads but you can forget to buy router/firewall for years.


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