In reply to a post by danielhyde:

The pfSense box I built to use at my office idles at 20W and peaked under a theoretical test load of 50W and handles 1Gbps from Openreach FTTP with ease.
It has the following specs:
AMD Athlon 200GE
8GB RAM
256GB NVMe SSD

Thanks
Dan

I thought PF and Opnsense did not like AMD or is it just the Ethernet they have problems with if it not intel?

I found a Kettop on Amazon. It looked like a rebrand of my Qotom which I bought from AliExpress. My box has an i7 proceesor with AES NI, 4 ethernet ports but no WiFi. I run either Pfsense or Opnsense.

I believe it is Broadcom NICs that they have problems with.
I use a 4 port Intel PCIe card in mine and don't have any issues.

Thanks
Dan

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

In reply to a post by danielhyde:

The pfSense box I built to use at my office idles at 20W and peaked under a theoretical test load of 50W and handles 1Gbps from Openreach FTTP with ease.
It has the following specs:
AMD Athlon 200GE
8GB RAM
256GB NVMe SSD

Thanks
Dan

I thought PF and Opnsense did not like AMD or is it just the Ethernet they have problems with if it not intel?

I was until recently using an APU2 and only stopped as I thought I would be on Swish FTTP by now.
It is really low power and should be OK for around 400mbit on PPPoE or 900mbit without.
I also bought an HP T620+ (AMD SoC based) before the prices went up as a backup and now have a Topton J4125 based mini PC.
Even at 10w max these little boxes are powerful enough to run OPNSense or pfSense virtually using free Proxmox so you can also run pihole, Unifi or anything else as a container or VM.

This STH article covers it pretty well.

https://www.servethehome.com/topton-intel-j4125-4x-i...

Edited by smouty (Thu 25-Aug-22 10:30:04)

That is an interesting combination.

How much memory does your mini PC use to run Opnsense and Pi-hole together?

In reply to a post by Spud2003:

I doubt it will be "more reliable" but it will typically have more features. I would go with OPNsense over pfSense although I'm currently running OpenWrt which boots very quickly off a USB stick and has lots of packages/features you can install(I'm running it on a Dell/Wyse £30 thin client I bought off eBay).

What model of Wyse box are you using? Where I work they have thousands of these things sitting doing nothing. Be interesting to know if I could utilise one as a router.

Pihole has 512Mb allocated and is still only using 7% of that
I have 4Gb allocated to OPNSense which is way overkill as it is using <10% of that but I have 16Gb in the box which isn't really used for anything else.

If you start adding services like Suricata then it can use more.

In reply to a post by gary333:

In reply to a post by Spud2003:

I doubt it will be "more reliable" but it will typically have more features. I would go with OPNsense over pfSense although I'm currently running OpenWrt which boots very quickly off a USB stick and has lots of packages/features you can install(I'm running it on a Dell/Wyse £30 thin client I bought off eBay).

What model of Wyse box are you using? Where I work they have thousands of these things sitting doing nothing. Be interesting to know if I could utilise one as a router.

Very few have dual NICs or space to add one which is why the T620+ was popular and I'm not an fan of using USB NICs in a router.
There are some options to add NICs to mini-PCIE connections but I think you'll end up paying more than you would for a box custom designed for this sort of use case.

For me its not the cost but how difficult it is to get it safely working without leaving a massive hole that anyone on the internet can easily walk through.

pfSense and OPNsense are no different in this regard to a [censored] ISP supplied router.

They'll both default to a safe setup, with NAT and no open ports.

You have to go out of your way to make them insecure.