5 ms·

A great resource for an excellently flexible and rock-solid reliable platform. Have been running pfsense and pfsense clusters for many, many years and had prac

A great resource for an excellently flexible and rock-solid reliable platform. Have been running pfsense and pfsense clusters for many, many years and had practically nothing but ultra-reliable success stories.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
> rock-solid reliable platform Eh... I've had a lot of issues with it on my flakey Charter internet[0] connection. Php-fpm hangs so often I added a cron job to restart it every fifteen minutes, it doesn't always run dhclient when an interface has been down for a bit and then comes back up (cron to the rescue again), the gateway monitor did weird and stupid things and had to be disabled, services aren't always restarted when they crash (Unbound recently) stuff like that. [0] I am aware that this combination of words is redundant.
- willejs 8y ago
  What hardware are you running pfsense on?
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    Some overpowered former thin client. It isn't likely to be the hardware, which can run Windows 7 comfortably.
    - mrmondo 8y ago
      ‘Windows 7’... doesn’t mean much to be honest, if that OS didn’t corrupt its filesystem it’d crap out on its poor kernel or registry design and regardless why would you run a presumably important routing system on the same hardware you thought was suitable for ‘Windows 7’ (rhetorical).
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
        High end routers made for enterprises run on significantly fewer resources than Windows 7 requires. If pfSense can't manage on this hardware then it is exceptionally bloated for its job.
- mrmondo 8y ago
  Sounds like you had some unrelated hardware issues TBH. I always run either decent quality fanless i3 or quad core celerons (yes I know, friends don’t let friends buy celerons but some recent models have been good bang for buck) for low impact deployments and always a cpu that supports and deployed with ECC memory for high impact / risk deployments because... ECC matters. Regardless, easy to blame a routing OS for commonly poor quality hardware.
LeftTurnSignal 8y ago
in a previous life, I had 5 Community version pfSense firewalls running off of Soekris net5505 boxes. They were in areas with a lot of power issues (UPS's helped as much as they can), so they were beaten up pretty bad for 6+ years before I left. Only issues I had were once I got 50mb up/down with 60+ users, it started to bog down. I virtualized that one in VMWare and that took care of that. I did have one power supply burn out and one CF card die, but those net5501 were in use for 8 years straight before I repurposed them. For $250 (in 2005 maybe?) for hardware, I can't complain at all. *Edit The best part was exporting the backup configs, then tossing them onto a new machine (another Soekris, VM, or PC hardware) and having a new firewall back up in minutes if you had the ethernet ports figured out beforehand.
- mrmondo 8y ago
  Similar experiences +/- scale, crazy realibility while immediately applying security / important updates when available.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago

> rock-solid reliable platform Eh... I've had a lot of issues with it on my flakey Charter internet[0] connection. Php-fpm hangs so often I added a cron job to restart it every fifteen minutes, it doesn't always run dhclient when an interface has been down for a bit and then comes back up (cron to the rescue again), the gateway monitor did weird and stupid things and had to be disabled, services aren't always restarted when they crash (Unbound recently) stuff like that. [0] I am aware that this combination of words is redundant.

willejs 8y ago
What hardware are you running pfsense on?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  Some overpowered former thin client. It isn't likely to be the hardware, which can run Windows 7 comfortably.
  - mrmondo 8y ago
    ‘Windows 7’... doesn’t mean much to be honest, if that OS didn’t corrupt its filesystem it’d crap out on its poor kernel or registry design and regardless why would you run a presumably important routing system on the same hardware you thought was suitable for ‘Windows 7’ (rhetorical).
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      High end routers made for enterprises run on significantly fewer resources than Windows 7 requires. If pfSense can't manage on this hardware then it is exceptionally bloated for its job.
mrmondo 8y ago
Sounds like you had some unrelated hardware issues TBH. I always run either decent quality fanless i3 or quad core celerons (yes I know, friends don’t let friends buy celerons but some recent models have been good bang for buck) for low impact deployments and always a cpu that supports and deployed with ECC memory for high impact / risk deployments because... ECC matters. Regardless, easy to blame a routing OS for commonly poor quality hardware.

LeftTurnSignal 8y ago

in a previous life, I had 5 Community version pfSense firewalls running off of Soekris net5505 boxes. They were in areas with a lot of power issues (UPS's helped as much as they can), so they were beaten up pretty bad for 6+ years before I left. Only issues I had were once I got 50mb up/down with 60+ users, it started to bog down. I virtualized that one in VMWare and that took care of that. I did have one power supply burn out and one CF card die, but those net5501 were in use for 8 years straight before I repurposed them. For $250 (in 2005 maybe?) for hardware, I can't complain at all. *Edit The best part was exporting the backup configs, then tossing them onto a new machine (another Soekris, VM, or PC hardware) and having a new firewall back up in minutes if you had the ethernet ports figured out beforehand.

mrmondo 8y ago
Similar experiences +/- scale, crazy realibility while immediately applying security / important updates when available.