Time to build a new pfSense box

T

The Spyder

2[H]4U
Joined
Jun 18, 2002
Messages
2,628
After a year of using a rather solid Cisco 881w, I finally decided it was time to build a new pfSense router. I looked at ALIX boards, custom ITX solutions, and ended up choosing a fan-less Intel DC2500CCE dual-core Atom with dual Intel 1GB Nic's. I bought a small case and used a Pico powersupply/4GB DDR3/SSD left over from another project, so the total was under $200- closer to $139. My favorite bit is: no moving parts! I plan on doing some thermal testing/power usage, but for now it's just burning in. The complete build took less then an hour from start to finish.



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The only bit bugging me right now is I missed out on the Ubiquiti edge router lite- if I had seen it was available- I would have bought it due to the low cost. The hardware I ended up with is overkill for my home setup, but what can I say, I love hardware :)
 
Nice little box there. I need to think about building a new one myself. Currently on a Dell 1650 P3, and the kicker, a SCSI drive! If that fails I'm doomed. Will be more expensive to replace the drive than the whole server lol.
 
How does a person so geeky enough to use pfsense also use a mac :(



j/k







kinda.
 
Nice motherboard.. where can i find one.. my google for that model didn't return much..
 
Metraon said:
Here is where I ordered it, watch out, if you live in Canada, you got to pay importing fees.

Link
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Nice thanks.. I am in canada.. so yeah would have to pay fees... I really don't need it.. but it looks nice.. right now i got pfsense running on a c2d so this would cut back on power somewhat.. but not sure if it would be enough difference to pay for itself...
 
Another Canadian here too. I am running pfSense based on a sandy bridge celeron with a cheapo motherboard and scavenged RAM and 2.5" HDD and a 1U rack mount case. I also have a used dual port Intel server NIC in it. Way overkill for what I need but lots of room for stuff like VPN and Snort. Uses about 30 - 40W and I think I could get that lower if I used a Pico power supply.
 
nice. planning to run pfsense in the near future. waiting on some stats for power usage :)
 
The folks on the pfSense forum are great. I would suggest starting there. When I built mine it was a toss up between an atom or sandy bridge based build. It ended up that the sandy bridge only used a little more power, cost a little bit more to build, but was able to handle a lot more in the way of extra packages. I decided that for a little extra cost the added benefits were worth it. With the new Ivy Bridge you can probably get the power consumption even lower. As I said, mine uses about 30W at idle and that is without a Pico PSU.
 
I've been running pfSense as a virtual appliance in vSphere 5.1 at home for several months now. Its been fantastic.
 
My pfSense install started out as a virtual appliance too and it was great. However, I like to tinker with my setup which means server restarts on a frequent basis. My wife didn't like the internet (and file server!) going down every time I wanted to play with my computers. I now have separate pfSense boxes and FreeNAS boxes. Isn't compromise great?
 
Which version of pfSense 2 or 2.1? When I built mine last year there was an issue with the video with the bsd kernel verison used on 2 so I had to use 2.1 beta.
 
2.03 worked fine for me, outside of some minor display corruption that was fixed by a screen refresh.
 
If your running it in a virtual appliance your console should be virtual as well.....I'm not sure how you would have screen issues on a virtual console. And rebooting your virtual environment frequently? Most virtual environments are designed to really never be rebooted outside of patches.
 
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