on the topic of the original post I would encourage people who really want an open source home area network router to run something like pfsense on a very small x86-64 system with four gigabit ethernet ports, rather than the linksys in the example.
Or better yet, OPNsense, as the NetGate team has time and time again shown that they are incredibly petty, and do not want to support the community in the most basic of ways.
+1, I switched to OPNsense about 11 months ago and could not be happier. Once the dust settled I also changed some of my small buiness customers over and it was a smooth experience.
The only thing holding me back from switching to OPNsense is the lack of pfblockerNG. To the best of my knowledge, there is no competing package available at the time.
Do you have any suggestions / personal experience with systems like this? I'm really concerned about getting something that isn't powerful enough to process stuff at gigabit+ rates, and most of the "routers" I've seen get pricey to do that.
The pcengines APU2 will do gigabit happily on four interfaces with passive cooling and ECC memory, there’s nothing but actual servers which will do more realistically speaking.
This is an annoyingly unfilled product space. I keep on wanting and the market keeps failing to provide something small, cheap, and with 2 gige ports. Heck, I don't even need x86_64, as long as there's a well supported Debian port.
Anyone have suggestions for even two gigabit ports and the lowest possible price?
Also, I'm curious if anyone has concrete examples of advantages of anything other than Debian for my router. I want to know if I'm missing out on cool features or some such :)
Earlier this week I bought a COOFUN GK41 with two Gbit Ethernet ports for $160. That included 8 GB ram and 120 GB SSD. It arrived yesterday, and I haven't installed OPNsense on it yet. So I can't report how well it works, or even whether it works.
I was considering a QOTOM Q355G4 until I decided I didn't need 4 NICs. They're $300-400ish, depending on configuration.
So the hardware is there, it's just from companies I'd never heard of.
Lowest seems to be Protectli (https://eu.protectli.com/vault-2-port/) or any of the chinese 4-port devices (Topton, Qotom, KingNovy, ...) in a barebones config where you add your own RAM & SSD.
ARM-based devices are not supported by pfSense / opnSense so you should stay with x86_64 based devices.
Used rack server is also an option if you want room to grow, Sandy Bridge and newer models have decent power consumption. My dl360e idles around 40W with five disks. Four gigabit ports, BMC, ECC, and you can virtualize pfsense and run additional containers and VMs on top.
