2 Questions in 1 about PFSense

[Z3R0C00L]

Greetings to all,

 

I have a PFSense router with the following specs:
- PFSense 2.1.5

- Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4 GHz
- 8 GB DDR2 800MHz
- 50 GB OCZ Agility 2 (SATA 3Gbps)
- 2 GBe PCIe Realtek + 1 GB Realtek onboard
- Motherboard .... old Acer crap which is still working

 

Internet connection: 60 Mbps download / 10 Mbps upload going through VPN (using OpenVPN)

Note that i'm using IPTV and VoIP, up to 10 device using the internet at the same time

 

 

1st question: I would like to know if i switch my NIC's for intel based one instead. Would i get any benefits like lower ping time, lower latency etc ... ? 

 

2nd question: I'm running (well trying to) Squid proxy to cache web content. Unfortunately, so far its not caching anything. I only get TCP_miss 200 regardless how many computers are accessing the same website. Any Idea what i'm doing wrong ?

 

Attached are screenshots of my config. 

 

Thanks for all the help you can provide!
 

[SOUTHwarrior]

Answer to the first question is no. Gigabit interfaces should be just fine for internal as long as you are using all gigabit on the lan any latency changes would not be that dramatic to justify changing your nics. Answer for the second question. Let me get back to you on that one. Ill try to replicate this on my pfsense box and see if I can get it to work.

[JamesDwho]

Generally speaking intel NIC's tend to perform a little better and tend to have lower CPU usage overhead, but for your needs Gigabit Realtek NIC's should be perfectly fine. In an enterprise scenario it might be a different story. As for the proxy Cache it seems that you have only installed the squid3 package and not just the regular squid package. You need the regular Squid package enable a transparent proxy, with a transparent proxy the network traffic from the devices on your network will automatically be passed through the proxy server rather than needing to configure specific proxy address for every device. All of your other settings for Cache Management and memory usage look fine.

[Z3R0C00L]

Is there a difference in between Squid3 and Squid except the release number (2.7.9 vs 3.1.20) ... as I thought it would technically do the same.

I also tried in transparent mode but unfortunately for me it didn't change anything. It does seems to cache something as /var/squid/cache is getting bigger and that more ram is being used. 
Deleting the local computer cache / temp internet files isn't triggering any hits.

 

Any other suggestions ?

[JamesDwho]

Yes there is, squid3 expands on the regular squid functionality and allows you to create a reverse proxy and do more advanced filtering of HTTPS traffic. I would recommend uninstalling all the squid packages you have installed and start fresh first with the regular squid 2.7.x package, once that's working then you should be able to setup some of the more advanced dynamic caching with squid3.

[Z3R0C00L]

Alright, so i switched back to Squid 2.7.9. It didn't cache at first BUT when i turned Disable VIA on it finally started caching. 
I don't see why/how this option made it to work but what ever it works

Thanks a lot for all the help.