pfSense Router

[PenguinMaster]

Does anyone know if this PC is powerful enough to run pfSense?

HP Compaq 8200 Elite Small Form Factor PC

The Specs of my specific PC is the i5-2400 and 4gb of ram. I am looking to do a 1GB Internet Connection.

[bcredeur97]

it's plenty unless you want to do caching. in which case you need more ram and likely solid state storage.

[PenguinMaster]

1 minute ago, bcredeur97 said:

it's plenty unless you want to do caching. in which case you need more ram and likely solid state storage.

I'm thinking I might put 8gb of Ram in and a small SSD.

[bcredeur97]

3 minutes ago, Chickenfans said:

I'm thinking I might put 8gb of Ram in and a small SSD.

cool. The cpu is plenty though I can assure you.

it even has the AVX new instructions unlike the i3's from that era so it will work on some later versions of pfsense once released where they will be requiring that you have that.

 

only possible situation I can see is if it's vulnerable to spectre/meltdown/etc

[PenguinMaster]

2 minutes ago, bcredeur97 said:

only possible situation I can see is if it's vulnerable to spectre/meltdown/etc

There isn't a security patch for that yet?

[Altruist]

6 minutes ago, Chickenfans said:

There isn't a security patch for that yet?

Its an expoilt on a hardware level requiring a designing a new architecture.

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

26 minutes ago, bcredeur97 said:

only possible situation I can see is if it's vulnerable to spectre/meltdown/etc

Sandy Bridge is indeed vulnerable to those. 

 

As for speed, I reckon that the i5-2400 is plenty for Gigabit.  Earlier this year I bought a Netgate SG-1000 to use as a router, and its 600Mhz single-core CPU is more than capable of handling 100Mbit of outgoing and incoming traffic (which suits me fine seeing as I only have 30 down and 5 up).  The machines on my network can still communicate with eachother at Gigabit speed due to the switch that I put behind the router.  

 

My only concern with using an old PC as a router is the power consumption.  Even without a GPU, a Sandy machine typically idles at around 35-40W.  The bespoke pfSense routers use around a tenth of that. 

Keeping in mind that most people leave their router on 24/7, that does add up after a couple of years.  At the estimated 30W difference in power draw, the difference is 260KWh/year.  Even at a 20W difference we're still talking 175Kw/year. 

Feel free to do the math yourself at your rates, then decide if you really want to use that old rig or get a bespoke pfSense router.

[Alex Atkin UK]

8 hours ago, bcredeur97 said:

only possible situation I can see is if it's vulnerable to spectre/meltdown/etc

Those bugs are meaningless on a router as they can only be exploited by running code on it that will exploit them.  They are pretty much only an issue for desktop use, or servers where you have no control over what your users are running on them so one user could potentially compromise other users data.

 

If you are running dodgy software on your router you are already screwed anyway as anything you install on there can run with root privileges.

[Falconevo]

KTI patches already exist in the latest version of pfSense, just like any other OS some software mitigation was put in place.

[Alex Atkin UK]

8 hours ago, Falconevo said:

KTI patches already exist in the latest version of pfSense, just like any other OS some software mitigation was put in place.

They do, but even the pfSense staff themselves suggest its probably not even necessary as that sort of bug cannot be exploited without running exploit software ON the router, which as I said you already lost at that point anyway as any software on the router can easily monitor all data passing through it.