Router hardware challenge

[jkenn99]

Did you consider a Mikrotik router?

http://routerboard.com/RB1100AHx2

http://routerboard.com/CCR1009-8G-1S

More than two ports, but they are FAST, and either one would give you all the customizability you could wish for.

[+BudMan MVC]

"100 mbit is a non-starter;"

 

Dude it was a typo -- Meant 1000mbit, since I clearly mention 900mbit right after that ;)  So hopefully your not talking about my comment of not able to push?  I have edited my orig post to reflect the 1000 mbit.

 

As to what he should consider - kind of late, since he has it already and testing with it ;)

 

When you do your gig test, make sure you test without pfsense between your 2 devices - and then with pfsense between..

[goatsniffer]

I've setup about a dozen of supermicro 1U atom boxes linked earlier using Untangle. They are very powerful gateway and security devices. While they hold their own in 75+ user scenarios, I haven't seen them work with anything over 50mbits. As an internal device on a gigiabit network you may want something more like the barebones devices linked earlier that support Xeon CPUs.

 

On my own home network I have an HP ProCurve as my backbone with vlan tagging, it handles simultaneous gigabit transfers without a problem. Sometimes the dedicated hardware devices move data more efficiently than the complex software solutions.

 

For my firewall/gateway I am simply using an Asus Router with Merlin firmware. I have 85mbit internet here and it keeps up just fine. Plus, I can WAN failover to a USB connected cellphone if I need.

[neufuse Veteran]

So far I'm liking this APU board. There was a very little bit of reconfiguring to get pfSense to boot (a whole one line needed changed in the kernel config) I'll post about that later. I've been running the thing with stress testing software for a while now, yeah it gets warm, but not hot, you notice it because of the way the heat sink is configured.

 

pfSense seems snappy, don't really notice any difference in routing speed form it and my demo unit I originally tested pfSense on (an intel 920 i7 system with 6GB of RAM and dual intel NIC's). I'm sure when I start pushing 1Gbps constant it might struggle a little bit, but as of now it's not going past 20% CPU usage so I don't think the review the IPFire site had on this board is accurate to the current BIOS firmware and the current drivers that pfSense uses.

 

The most annoying thing though is the boards serial console is at 115200 baud, while pfSense by default has a 9600 baud console... so had to keep switching baud rates between boot and initial load.

 

There is a newer BIOS then the one I have now, but haven't upgraded it yet.. I'm on the december 2013 BIOS, the current on is April 2014. I'll have to try it later and see how it goes.

budman, anything specific you think I should try out or anything you'd like to see?

[neufuse Veteran]

some quick pictures of the APU board and the case

 

[Crisp]

I built my 1U pfSense box myself

 

 

Intel Atom D2500cc, dual Intel gigabit nic, old 7200rpm drive.

 

Currently sat in the rack.

[neufuse Veteran]

Just put a kill-a-watt on it, during boot it uses 10-11 Watts, after pfSense loaded it fell down to around 8 Watts

[neufuse Veteran]

point to point through the router speed tests gets me about 700Mbit before the CPU maxes out, not bad for a home router

[neufuse Veteran]

I'm going to say right now, these initial numbers are probably not accurate due to me still configuring pfSense and setting up AMD T40E specific features like power management, and network setting changes.

[neufuse Veteran]

yesterday I threw in an Intel 30GB mSATA card on the APU board, reinstalled pfSense with the USB Memstick installer and it is running DRASTICALLY faster... didn't think it would but it is..

 

It seems to be maxing out at 820 Mbit / sec with peaks to 840Mbit/s routing wise with at 78% CPU load

 

did notice that when using the SD card as a storage medium for the OS during load the CPU usage spikes, it uses a USB interface on board to talk to the SD card and seems to be offloading a lot of it's work to the CPU... going to the mSATA card with a on card controller made that CPU load virtually nill during load