pfSense

[jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org (Jarod Wilson)]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 5:35 PM, Tom Metro <tmetro-blu-5a1Jt6qxUNc at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Jarod Wilson wrote:
>> I've recently taken up pfSense for my router. Lets you do all sorts of
>> crazy things, like utilize p0f to create OS-specific rules...
>
> I hear pfSense mentioned increasingly as the routing solution of choice
> for power users.

Nb: this purchase and deployment was probably at least partially a
result of the debate between Rich and I (and others) on multi-tiered
security, access control, etc. Figured, hey, why not, I've heard good
things about pfSense, wouldn't mind playing with it, and then I'd
force myself to be a bit less lazy about security, etc. :)

> What hardware are you running it on?

Bought this motherboard explicitly for pfSense:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813153150

Went with this board for multiple reasons:

1) supports frequency scaling -- the box scales down to 350MHz, with a
ceiling of 1.2GHz (which isn't quite clear from the specs)
2) dual onboard GbE (I have a 3rd GbE NIC in the PCI slot for DMZ usage)
3) via padlock crypto engine -- at some point, I intend to screw
around with ipsec and/or openvpn some more, having hardware crypto
acceleration is a nice plus (its fully supported under both linux and
bsd).

> One of the reasons pfSense isn't as widely used as the various
> Linux-based WRT firmwares is that the latter runs on semi-proprietary
> hardware, and typically depends on proprietary drivers. It would be
> great if you could get pfSense to run on sub-$100 hardware.

Well, the board was $99 shipped (got it next day from newegg's NJ
warehouse even w/free shipping), and I already had a mini-itx case
laying around, as well as an old stick of DDR2-667 RAM (512MB[*]) and
a 20GB SATA laptop drive, so its *almost* sub-$100... :)

[*] 512MB is waaaaaay more than enough RAM, but its the smallest DDR2
stick I had laying around.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org