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I had asked in another thread about a good 1U firewall.

pfSense in combination with a SuperMicro Atom SuperServer was suggested & upvoted a bunch of times. The Atom D525 build with 4 GB RAM runs about $600 incl. tax. Any alternative suggestions? Otherwise I'll buy the SuperServer. Thanks!

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AX1
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  • Duplicate of - http://serverfault.com/questions/212734/good-1u-rack-firewall . I'm serious, why did you feel the need to ask this question twice? – micmcg Dec 15 '10 at 22:35
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    @micmcg - It's not the same question. The first post was asking generically about a rackmount firewall. Now that he's narrowed his selections down to pfSense running on $something, he's soliciting advice on what that $something should be. – EEAA Dec 15 '10 at 22:39

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I would go with that SuperMicro model. With anything cheaper than that, I believe you're going to have a hard time pushing 100Mbps, especially if you're running any decent amount of that traffic through VPN tunnels (IPSec or otherwise).

EEAA
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  • I actually wouldn't mind even spending $50 more (but I think the Atom D525 is already the most high-end Atom) just to have assurance that it'll work well. I'd also like to run RRD graphs and maybe use the server as a cheap NAS for infrequent off-machine backups (I'll put a 1.5TB HDD in there) so I'm just hoping it won't run at 100% utilization from just the firewall. – AX1 Dec 15 '10 at 22:58
  • @AX1 See my comment in your first question. I provided a link that shows a Atom D510 system doing over 50Mbps with snort running and only using 28% of it's cpu. pfSense has RRD graphs built in. But it also supports snmp if you want to use cacti, munin, or zenoss to do the graphing remotely. I don't know if you'll be able to run a NAS off of pfSense but I've never looked into doing that. I'm not sure I would be comfortable with putting data that close to the edge of my network. – 3dinfluence Dec 15 '10 at 23:21
  • Cool! Convinced... buying it now. – AX1 Dec 16 '10 at 00:25
  • Done and done. Bought the server... hopefully it will be here before the weekend. Atom D525, 4 GB DDR3/1333 RAM, 1.5TB 7200 RPM HDD. Got a great deal for less than $550 incl tax and shipping :) – AX1 Dec 16 '10 at 02:21
  • @AX1 - good luck! I think you'll be very please with pfSense. It's truly one of the great F/OSS projects out there. – EEAA Dec 16 '10 at 02:22
  • @ErikA: Haha, I think mostly I will be back with hundreds of questions on Serverfault! This is the first time I'm trying something like this, and I'm not a linux expert at all, which makes it a bit scary. But looking forward to spending my weekend with it :D hope you will be around! – AX1 Dec 16 '10 at 02:32