Watchguard Router

[PenguinMaster]

I am thinking of buying this watchguard router, and running PfSense on it. I have a one gigabit internet connection to my house, and I was wondering if this can do gigabit speeds, because I see on the front panel, above Ethernet Port 0, it says only 10/100, but all the other ports say 10/100/1000, but isn't port 0 meant for the Internet connection Input?

[Falconevo]

11 minutes ago, Chickenfans said:

I am thinking of buying this watchguard router, and running PfSense on it. I have a one gigabit internet connection to my house, and I was wondering if this can do gigabit speeds, because I see on the front panel, above Ethernet Port 0, it says only 10/100, but all the other ports say 10/100/1000, but isn't port 0 meant for the Internet connection Input?

If you do, you won't have AES-NI support which means you will be limited going forward with pfSense updates as they are stopping updating systems that don't have AES-NI support on the x86 CPU(s).

You can use any of the ports for any WAN or LAN connections, you are not limited to the 10/100 port you can use any of the 1000 full duplex ports for WAN/LAN/OPT etc.

 

Personally I would avoid and find a system with AES-NI support as I doubt that can do 'real' 1Gbit WAN<>LAN throughput but I have never seen that particular unit in operation.  I have used a 5 series 545 which was decent.

[PenguinMaster]

-

[PenguinMaster]

42 minutes ago, Falconevo said:

If you do, you won't have AES-NI support which means you will be limited going forward with pfSense updates as they are stopping updating systems that don't have AES-NI support on the x86 CPU(s).

You can use any of the ports for any WAN or LAN connections, you are not limited to the 10/100 port you can use any of the 1000 full duplex ports for WAN/LAN/OPT etc.

 

Personally I would avoid and find a system with AES-NI support as I doubt that can do 'real' 1Gbit WAN<>LAN throughput but I have never seen that particular unit in operation.  I have used a 5 series 545 which was decent.

Thanks! I will look into that.

[PenguinMaster]

@Falconevo do you know any good routers that will run PfSense? I’ve heard people having luck with Dell poweredge r210’s & r410’s. I’m looking for something rackmountable.

[Falconevo]

5 minutes ago, Chickenfans said:

@Falconevo do you know any good routers that will run PfSense? I’ve heard people having luck with Dell poweredge r210’s & r410’s. I’m looking for something rackmountable.

I personally use R410's because they are cheap, if you don't care about power usage then just grab an R410 to do the job.  Single CPU is more than enough but if you find one cheap with 2 CPU's why not ehh?  R210 would do the job but they are garbage plagued with reboots causing failures and memory tests failing on warm restarts.

 

If you plan on going down the R410 route, the 5600 series Xeon have the AES-NI instruction set this is crucial to have on your pfSense box;

 

Spec;

Dell R410

CPU - L E or X series 5600 Xeon with AES-NI support - Supported CPU list (Intel Ark URL)

Memory - 8G

Storage - 8G SSD or cheap mech drives

Network - Intel 1G daughterboard (or if you cant find one, buy a 2 port Intel PCIe card like a NC360T or diff model if you want more than 2 ports)
 

Stuff that's really helpful but not really required

iDrac enterprise (to give you out of bounds console access when you break stuff)

Dual PSU
Perc H200 or H700 raid card