pfSense

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

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 1:39 PM, Tom Metro <tmetro-blu-5a1Jt6qxUNc at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Jarod Wilson wrote:
>> 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
>
> Nice, but a bit heavy weight for a router. Unless you're repurposing old
> hardware, the more typical choices are low-power, non-x86 boards, like
> the PC Engines hardware the other responder mentioned.

Best as I can tell, pfSense only supports x86 and x86_64. I've got a
WRT54GS I toyed with at one point (both dd-wrt and openwrt), and it
was grossly underpowered as a vpn endpoint, so I went with something I
knew would have more than enough oomph for high throughput crypto. :)

>> Well, the board was $99 shipped...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... :)
>
> Great if you've got the parts in your junk box.
>
> But wouldn't it be nice if you could get something with specs like:
>
> ? ?* CPU: 533MHZ
> ? ?* RAM: 128MB
> ? ?* Flash: 32MB
> ? ?* Ethernet: 5 x Gb ports
> ? ?* USB: 2 x 2.0 ports
> ? ?* Wifi: B,G,N
>
> with case and power supply for $80? (That happens to be an Asus RT-N16.)

Yeah, that's probably a better buy for many people, but I'm assuming
isn't an option for pfSense. Would be curious how well it does at
crypto under (presumably) openwrt or similar though...

> I see some media player appliances are switching to more generic ARM
> CPUs instead of proprietary media player chipsets. Maybe the same thing
> will happen in the consumer router space, and open up opportunities for
> porting other OSs to them.

Hadn't even considered that... Some of the NMT and similar devices
would be entertaining. Almost all have at least one ethernet interface
and usb2 ports, so usb-ethernet adapters would likely be viable
(though I dunno how good/reliable any of them are).

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