I’m looking for some hardware to move my ipfire installation to.
Currently it was running on a vm (virtualbox, hosted on an old Xeon E5-2680 v2), but it turns out it was not a good idea (the vm…).
I’m looking for some low-power, affordable options, able to handle at least 1GB (current fiber speed is 1G but could be upgraded to 2.5Gb in the future), and handle 2xIpsec, several open-vpn user connections and also web-proxy+url filter. So it would need a bit of ressources to run.
Anyone already tested ipfire on one of those ?
Would a N150 be sufficient to handle the load or should I shoot for a N305 or N355?
The processing power is not the issue as its not cpu intensive, however, since these are single channel memory, that might impact it depending on what is simultaneously going on. On a PPPoe connection I wouldn’t recommend a single channel memory system. No matter what router os/ software stack is used. Same if you are going to run vpn connections.
its the same with other router os-es like WRT, pf sense, open sense, router os etc. memory buffers and their size determine throughput between Ethernet interfaces. The Linux memory manager will balance buffers across memory channels for the best throughput latency. In single channel you don’t have this advantage and some router Oses that run off BSD don’t have a good memory manager and don’t optimize these buffers. In these, they add a wait state since they strictly run in single channel memory mode and as a side effect, induce latency on the outside Ethernet interface as traffic from the network side has to go through a software buffer on its way to the WAN interface.
both of them are single channel memory processors. So they will have this latency.
I’m not saying its not going to work, its just not going to be faster than what the top of the line store router can do.
Intel Atom and Xenon D are the standard router CPUs primarily because they focus more on i/o performance. I found it interesting how many of those router PCs from Amazon are not build with the standard affair and use low end laptop and tablet pc cpus for this. Atom C2558 should be their main stream while an Atom C3958 would be the high end of that line of processors.
The point is if this and the higher effective bandwith (DDR4 peak speeds are 3200 mega transfers per second and DDR5 starts at 4800 mega transfers per second) is enough.
The point was:
“The processing power is not the issue as its not cpu intensive, however, since these are single channel memory, that might impact it depending on what is simultaneously going on. On a PPPoe connection I wouldn’t recommend a single channel memory system. No matter what router os/ software stack is used. Same if you are going to run vpn connections.”
Things like this we have to see if theory works in the application. I remembered when a lot of people made claims around IPV6 being faster which on paper looks like the case, however, in practice its not any faster than ipv4.
Ok, I was not expecting so much discussions on this topic, but very interesting and instructive overall.
Since I understand that might not be the best option but should somehow be sufficient for my use at home, I’ll get one (not this exact model in fact, but a similar one, cheaper, based on N150 and with 8G DDR5). For the offices I’ll hold on for now.
see the attached picture. it serves as my NAS with a 1.5 TB mounted HDD. It serves as my router, firewall, and switch (with 2.5 GB NIC x 10 ports) as all my home is hardwired with 2 ports used with 2 mesh access points that have wan 2.5 GB port. The HP desktop PC costs 60 dollars on eBay, and each 4 port 2.5 GB card costs 40 dollars. The device is scalable in case you need it in the future. Finally, my is corei5, 16 GB RAM, and 128 GB NVMe for booting/OS. Take a look at my attached pictures.
