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I’ve always wanted to run a small pi box as a router with pfsense. Right now my only other option for a small all in one, low power pfsense box is maybe an Inte
by SxC97 5y ago
I’ve always wanted to run a small pi box as a router with pfsense. Right now my only other option for a small all in one, low power pfsense box is maybe an Intel NUC?
- rasz 5y agoor free 8 year old laptop with a cracked screen
- kube-system 5y agoYour biggest hurdle there is that pfsense requires x86-64
- walrus01 5y agoFor pfsense you'd really do a lot better with a small x86-64 system (mini-itx motherboard) that has four or more gigabit ethernet ports with Intel chipset onboard, attached to PCI-E 3.0 bus. In a small mini-itx case it would definitely be a lot bigger than a raspberry pi but also a great deal more capable. Depending on your needs you can also get systems that have several 10GbE SFP+ cages on-motherboard.
- kube-system 5y agoIf you search "mini firewall appliance" or "pfsense router" on your favorite marketplaces you'll get results for some custom intel hardware that has all of everything you need in a package smaller than mITX.
- walrus01 5y agoyes, the usual industrial/embedded motherboard manufacturers build such things, some are NUC sized.
- digitallyfree 5y agoIf you're looking for something cheaper than a Pi try finding used thin clients, which are basically x86 industrial PCs. With a managed switch behind it you can use seperate VLANs so that you can run pfsense with both WAN and LAN on a single NIC. Obviously this will cause reduced speed on the WAN-LAN interface due to the single shared NIC, but if you're looking at a Pi anyways the networking performance of the thin client may be adequate for your needs.