I have been running IPFire for many years on a old DELL Optiplex 745 with a core2duo.
It is using about 85-90 watts of energy. So it is a bit expensive to run.
So i have an old motherboard from a laptop that i will use.
It is an upgrade as well it use less energy.
But i dont have an SSD for it yet. The motherboard have no USB3 ports.
I have an 8GB USB stick that i thinking on to use untill i get an SSD.
How slow will it be if i install it on a USB stick. Is it something that will effect the speed of my connection such lower speeds or higher ping?
Or is it just when i do changes and configs on the router that will be slow?
For the second network card i removed the WI-FI card and bought a mini PCI-E ethernet card (1gbit/s). And i will make my own case for it that i can mount in a rack.
There are empty cases i can screw in to a rack that i can buy.
I run for testing purpose IPFire on PCEngines machine using a 2.5 inches hard drives connected to the usb3.0 port with a SATA-USB adapter and I did not see any problem in term of speed and performance. I would not use the proxy though, unless you specify to only use the ram, otherwise your usb stick will die earlier. I never tried to use a USB 2 though.
In general, consider the firewall as you lock. Would you use a 50 euros lock to protect you 10,000 bike?
The USB stick is just a temporary solution until i can get my hands on an SSD.
I dont know if i want to buy a brand new SSD or if i should go with a used SSD.
The pros with a new SSD is good performance and warranty for 3 years minimum (stated by Swedish law).
The Pros with a used SSD is that they are cheaper and i can choose a small size (like 32gb - 64gb). Even the SSD:s from a good manufacturer like samsung and intel could be cheap.
The cons are: no warranty and i dont know about its health. If i can find one very cheap maybee it could be worth it. If i find one SSD from a good manufacturer like samsung or intel, is it worth 10usd for a 32-64gb size?
I dont really need the performance from an SSD at all.
But i choose an SSD over a HDD cause it use mutch less power.
The specs of the system is:
CPU: Intel i3 2310M @ 2.1 GHz (2 core, 4 threads)
RAM: 4GB DDR3 1333MHz (2x2GB)
LAN (Green): Built in Ethernet (Realtek)
WAN (Red): Realtek RTL8111H Mini PCIe to Gigabit Ethernet
I bought the extra network card on ebay to install in the port where the WI-FI card was installed in. There are 2 variants of the ethernet card.
One with a singel ethernet port and one with dual ethernet ports.
I was first going to take the dual port but i saw that the card was longer then the WI-FI card . And that wont fit on the motherboard. But the singel port was the same size as the WI-FI card.
So it arrived on thursday (June 3:rd).
Link to the network card: New Mini PCIe to Dual Port Gigabit Network Card RTL8111H 1000Mbps RJ45 Lan Card | eBay
If the computer works good with IPFire in it i need a case for it. There are cheap cases that i can mount in a rack. I have a 24 port switch that i can mount in a rack as well (HP Procurve 1810-24G, fanless 24 port layer 2 managed gbit switch) that i got cheap on a Swedish auction site. It is old and not the fastest. But it has lifetime warranty and i dont need more then 1gbit/s speeds on my network anyway.
Certainly people use uSD cards, long-term, with ARM based IPFire. If you are going to install on USB stick then unpack the x86_64.xz image to it, rather than installing from x86_64.ISO.
The price of new 256 GB SSD has plummeted in recent months. You could well find that it is more economical to go straight to one of those.
You can also use the ISO to Install on an USB Stick. Choose “ext4 without journal” and disable the swap partition in /etc/fstab to prevent dead writing of a media without wear leveling.
But keep in mind that a rootfilesystem without journal may be corrupted if the system was not always shoutdown properly.