Gigabit Pfsense on these specs?

[Cole lyons]

Poweredge 2850 Xeon Nocona 2.8GHz 2 4GB DDR2.

 

Will pfsense work with gigabit on this? 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Depends on what you want your router to do.

 

ALso thats a very old power hungry system, get something newer, it will pay for its self in the power savings alone. and you get newer instructions like aes-ni that pfsense will require and makes some tasks much faster.

[Cole lyons]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Depends on what you want your router to do.

 

ALso thats a very old power hungry system, get something newer, it will pay for its self in the power savings alone. and you get newer instructions like aes-ni that pfsense will require and makes some tasks much faster.

Ok awesome thanks. 

[Razor Blade]

It should work.

 

Though please note that it has been iterated by Netgate that PFsense 2.5+ will require the AES encryption instruction which isn't present on that CPU.

(source: https://www.netgate.com/blog/pfsense-2-5-and-aes-ni.html)

[BrinkGG]

31 minutes ago, Cole lyons said:

Poweredge 2850 Xeon Nocona 2.8GHz 2 4GB DDR2.

 

Will pfsense work with gigabit on this? 

It WILL work, just make sure you get a NIC that is supported by PfSense. I got screwed building my first pfsense box when I bought a card that had an unsupported chipset. 

That is also a single core processor... So it may be worthwhile to upgrade it if you want to do anything more then just routing through pfsense (LAN monitoring, adblocking through proxy, etc.) 

[Salv8 (sam)]

2 hours ago, Razor Blade said:

It should work.

1 hour ago, Brink2Three said:

It WILL work

it will but it will consume a lot of power

my recommendation is to replace it with a newer processor or get one of these https://amzn.to/2JBuzsf

a. it's very low powered

b. the processor in this should be faster while using way less power (even though it's an atom, the architectural improvements make up for it's loss of cores, threads and cache size)

c. it's got gigabit, which is what you want

d. faster ram which will help with loading cached websites on the device

e. it's fanless so it will be quiet (not sure if this is wanted but i'll still put it here)

d. it's small, so it won't take up space for other network devices

[Razor Blade]

2 hours ago, Brink2Three said:

It WILL work, just make sure you get a NIC that is supported by PfSense. I got screwed building my first pfsense box when I bought a card that had an unsupported chipset. 

That is also a single core processor... So it may be worthwhile to upgrade it if you want to do anything more then just routing through pfsense (LAN monitoring, adblocking through proxy, etc.) 

If the OP is using the onboard NIC I believe that server had dual Broadcom Gb NICs which shouldn't have an issue.

51 minutes ago, Salv8 (sam) said:

it will but it will consume a lot of power

my recommendation is to replace it with a newer processor or get one of these https://amzn.to/2JBuzsf

a. it's very low powered

b. the processor in this should be faster while using way less power (even though it's an atom, the architectural improvements make up for it's loss of cores, threads and cache size)

c. it's got gigabit, which is what you want

d. faster ram which will help with loading cached websites on the device

e. it's fanless so it will be quiet (not sure if this is wanted but i'll still put it here)

d. it's small, so it won't take up space for other network devices

I agree that it would consume a lot of power, however I believe the OP just wanted to know if it would work or not. If I was asked my opinion, I wouldn't bother with a micro appliance. For about 15% of the cost, you can get a surplus SFF PC or light client with a PCI slot which would be perfectly fine to run and learn PFsense.

[Cole lyons]

Want to let you know, I've given up on this project and will be going with a different solution. 

[Mikensan]

I would hop on ebay and look at buying a Dell R210 II, you can find them as cheap as $150. You could kick it up a notch and use the R210 as a virtual server and virtualize your pfsense and setup another VM for backups ;-).