I have an old DL385P gen8 that i would like to use as a router/ firewall. Will ipFire run on it… it has dual processors and 128gb of ram. Im not worried about power consumption… just performance.
Router with 128GB 
are you an ISP? 
Could you post some specs about your server ?
I assume that these servers came with AMD Opteron CPU, once you install it, IPFire has a vulnerabilities check list, but if you prefer you could at find out in advance what was the latest firmware update for this model
what type of NIC does it have? You would need at least dual NIC’s
And most importantly, does it have SSD or just HDD? you want a fast flash memory instead of a spinning disk for a router.
Looking forward for your reply
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I have a custom build router with similar specs, 8 core opteron, 16 GB ram, and raid 10.
Just make sure you have server grade Intel NIC Cards, 2 is the minimum for red and green, but if you want a segmented wifi guest network or a dmz in the setup you will need 4. PM me if you have more questions.
Sometime this weekend i will be dusting off the old hp dl385p… the exact hardware specs escape me at the moment.
I do know that it is opteron… dual 16 core
And i recently upgraded the hp nic to a dual 10gb sfp+ card
It indeed does have opterons… they are Opteron 6380s… 16 cores each. It has 128gb of ddr3 memory… 24 1tb sas hdds… HP flexfabric 2-port 526FLR sfp+ adapter and 4 onboard intel 1gb ports… not exactly sure what chip. I have an ssd upgrade kit for it but its missing the cable to connect ot to the motherboard. It also currently has an Nvidia 1650 gpu in it.
The 526flr uses a QLogic P3+ chipset… and i have quite a few Emulux P008821 dual port sfp+ cards but they are Lenovo branded. Hopefully they will work.
I also have an AMD 1920x Threadripper i could use.
What I have learnt on this forum is that you need to make sure that the network cards you use have multi queue capability so that the traffic on one interface can be spread across multiple cores.
If they don’t have that capability then the traffic from one interface has to all be dealt with by one cpu core while the rest sit idle.
I cannot understand why waste so much power and CPU with a router distro that can’t handle two concurrent WAN/RED connections.
Yes? Care to go into some actual useful explanations?
Im new to seting up router OSs… so useful information will be greatly appreciated
Do you have a recommendation for a good SFP+ nic that has this functionality?
IpFire do not support multiple WAN connections, currently.
Unless can be configured as “mobile connections”.
Having this kind of computational power i’d use only software that allows me to have more than one internet connection and that I can somehow manage.
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Thank you… im not exactly sure what my actual setup will be just yet. I have 10gb fiber backbone already… soon my internet will be 2gb fiber up and down. I currently have a Luxul 4400 router and the wan is bottle necked from it. So i at least know i want a 2.5gb wan and 10gb lan.
Im thinking about moving the build to my 1920x threadripper build. It has nvme and 128gb ddr4
BCM947XX as CPU…
2gbit fiber might be too much to chew for that mouth, but it’s far power efficient (and silent) than a Rack Server
I am afraid not. I am just a home user so have a Lightning Labs mini appliance which had the nic’s already installed and those are Intel 211’s which are capable of doing the multi queue. There have been other users in the past where they had multi core processors but the nic’s weren’t multi queue and so when there was a lot of traffic on one nic it was all dealt with by one core on the cpu leaving the others sitting with very low usage. With multi queue the traffic can be spread across all the cores from all the nic’s so you maximise the use of the processor you have.
It is just something you should check the specs for on whichever nic’s you are looking at.
Hopefully there should be other forum users who do have more knowledge on SFP+ nic’s
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Mellanox/nVidia and Intel are for SFP+ two “sure names” to look into.
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