Building a pfSense Box

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shrub

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#1706989 21-Jan-2017 14:44

I have had it running on a q6600 but I also have a home server that is more than capable of running it in a VM. So I though I could save power by merging the 2 computers.

i7 2600 8gb ram and SSD HDD win 10 Pro I have the 4 port gigabit network card up and running and VMware workstation 12. I have also tried virtualbox. The issue is the VLAN i cant get it to work.

Has anyone successfully managed to get it running in a VM?

sparkz25

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#1707049 21-Jan-2017 17:57

havent had the chance to try out pf sense, but i have mutiple sophos utms running with vpns and all and love them, i made my first one out of a HP t5740 thin client with 3 gigs of ram and that worked really well it was a bit of a project that i had fun doing and a lot of mods to get it to all fit inside the case, it has a m.2 ssd 3 gigs of ddr3 ram and dual gig nics

my new sophos firewall is now a old 1ru case from trade me that i paid 50.00 for including power supply and has a mitac PD11BI (CC) main board and a single 4 gig stick of ram the main board cost me something like 250 ish and the ram was like 40 ish

http://client.mitac.com/products-embedded-board-PD11BI.html

these both work awesome on gig fiber with speeds of 900+meg

these are the pics of the thin client and the mods to make it all fit

hio77

'That VDSL Cat'
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Lizard Networks

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#1707059 21-Jan-2017 18:42

very clean modifications there!

love it

#include <std_disclaimer>

Any comments made are personal opinion and do not reflect directly on the position my current or past employers may have.

macuser

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#1707265 21-Jan-2017 23:15

Yeap Sophos UTM as I have previously stated is a really great business firewall OS you can get for free on X86. It is missing consumer features like UPNP (which itself is really a security risk) as well as the DHCP server being able to map entries to DNS (required for SMB3 multichannel), but other than that, includes amazing UTM and IPS support for free - at work we have clients paying over a thousand year for Fortinet renewals!

I built my box using the Skylake B150 chipset and a Pentium G4400. The host OS is Server 2016, with Sophos running in a VM. It works fantastically and very stable. I can easily max out my 1000/500 connection using the G4400 using a I350-T4 Intel NiC, and I also have a Mellanox 10G card for direct connect to a workstation PC (the router is also a nas server so 10G throughput was useful).

I'm interested to see how the new Apollo Lake chipsets fair with Sophos, but as I stated above I will be upgrading to the Kaby Lake G4560 to take advantage of hyperthreading.

vulcannz

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#1708534 24-Jan-2017 11:03

macuser:

Yeap Sophos UTM as I have previously stated is a really great business firewall OS you can get for free on X86. It is missing consumer features like UPNP (which itself is really a security risk) as well as the DHCP server being able to map entries to DNS (required for SMB3 multichannel), but other than that, includes amazing UTM and IPS support for free - at work we have clients paying over a thousand year for Fortinet renewals!

You are comparing apples with oranges though. Fortinet is a hardware accelerated platform with decent IPS/UTM, validated with independent testing, from what I've seen it has much more IPS/UTM signatures than the Sophos engine. The Fortinet passes the standardized Spirent Mu tests while the Sophos fails.

So sure, Sophos is great for a free product. But keep it in perspective when comparing it to the likes of the Fortinet.

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