Small form factor PFSENSE HW that can do greater than 1Gig / SFP+ ?

Started by Lazybones, May 29, 2022, 05:27:05 PM

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Lazybones

Quote from: Melbosa on December 07, 2022, 11:39:44 AMWhat about a Netgate 4100 or 6100? More expensive though, but I've owned one for years and solid units.

I mentioned them earlier in the thread the 4100 is an option but function to price it is fairly low.. the 6100 is over $1000 CAD and way out of budget.

The Netgate 4100 is about $816.92 CAD putting it fairly close to the OpnSense DEC700s before taxes and shipping. In that regard it is unclear to me if the Netgate is locked to PFSense.. I know the  DEC700s can run OpnSense, OpenWRT and a few other platforms..

I am leaning towards OpnSense for my home setup vs Pfsense.

The R86s tops out at about $647.31 CAD making it a fair bit more affordable and it runs essentially what ever you want on it, no odd chipsets to deal with.

As far as function goes I am also considering that on the R86s or similar I could run Proxmox as the base and maybe run some lite VMs / dockers.

Tom

Hahaha. I was going to post the R86S video. Might upgrade to one in the new year sometime if I can get rid of the trailer.

My current box is good enough for now, but I really want to play with 2.5/5g and 10g in the future. Switches and nics have dropped in price pretty dramatically.

Also my current firewall box has a weird glitch where it doesn't always boot if it's rebooted/powered up. I haven't had the time/desire to figure it out. Not sure if maybe because it has a display out it really wants a monitor connected or if it's opnsense being funky or if it's a bios/hw problem.
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Lazybones

Quote from: Tom on December 14, 2022, 08:27:44 AMHahaha. I was going to post the R86S video. Might upgrade to one in the new year sometime if I can get rid of the trailer.

If you have been following the STH reviews of those cheap aliexpress boxes and also check the comments apparently directly from the R86S manufacture we might see more variants of it fairly quickly as they tend to iterate on these things based on available parts / cost cutting very fast with model names / product names being very lose lol.

Lazybones

Came across this recently ASRock NUC BOX-1260P STH Review has dual intel 2.5 Ethernet NICs and a very powerful current CPU. Would make a great virtualized option.

Due to budget stretch and lack of a clear "win" I have started converting my home EdgeRouter Config to OPNSense on old hardware to give it a go till I find my final hardware. Which has been annoying and interesting at the same time. OPNSense feels like an old school ASA firewall (Interface based rules) but with a bunch of very current packaged strapped on top.

Lazybones

Resurrecting this thread as I actually purchased something after a lot of research, price watching and budget waiting.

Managed to score an R86S-U2 for $359.86 CAD

- 3x 2.5Gbit rj45 ports
- 2x 10Gbit SFP+ ports
- Ultra small form factor
- N5105 CPU
- 16 GB on board RAM (non upgradable)
- 128 GB on board eMMC embedded storage.

Running OPNSense.

Step 1, in my 3 part network upgrade plan of getting my home network up to 2.5Gbit.

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