Dual WAN using pfSense

[zorglub]

Hi,

I've been running for 2 years a Linksys RV082 with two connections: 20/2 and 20/1 Mbps. It has been running quite ok. However my cable company just upgrade to DOCSIS 3.0 and I now have the connections : 120/10 and 20/1 Mbps. I found out that the maximum throughput I get from my RV082 is about 46Mbps which is a shame since I am wasting more than half of my connection.

Therefore I have been looking for alternatives. Peplink could be a solution but it is crazy expensive. I've been thinking about building my own pfSense system with 3 gigE interfaces (2 for WAN and one for LAN). But I am wondering what is your experience regarding this. Which kind of minimal hardware should I get to be able to plug in 3 gigE interfaces while using the least power possible to save costs.

Thank you in advance

 

[justin2net]

a fairly low power box should be able to take care of such a load. i know pcengines alix won't be able to sustain that speed. personally i am building a vmware ESXi whitebox with a similar application-two WANs, run pfsense and a ton of other virtual machines (server applications, etc), and quad gigabit aggregated to a switch.

 

[zorglub]

Let me know more details about your box when you have them. For me it's important to go as low power as possible as this is something that will be on 24/7.

I have also been looking at the MikroTik RB 1000 which has 4 gigE ports. But I havent yet discovered if their RouterOS can dedicate 2 of those ports to WAN and do load balancing between them.

 

[justin2net]

Mine is fairly intensive, but relatively low cost: Q6600 quad core CPU, Intel 4 port gigabit adapter, 8 GB ddr2. Keep in mind that my setup runs not only pfSense but a multitude of other stuff, but you should be looking at perhaps Via C7 or Atom (atom might even be too much, should easily handle 100 MB/s traffic)

I suggest you head over to pfSense forums, they'll help you out with the HW specifics.

 

[vnangia]

I have been trying to build one for a while. The board I picked up was a 600MHz Celeron, as detailed here. Unfortunately, I've been stymied by my inability to get pfSense booting - problems with booting off a USB CD-ROM.