I can only second what everyone else has said... If cheap is 'best', grab any old box and throw some NICs in it. Downsides of this approach are power consumption and the associated 'mostly works' weirdness of used hardware.
I've found a 4 port j1900 board in a case with rack mount brackets that I put an MSATA SSD and 4 GB of memory in. It lives in my 7U office/lab rack and may be the best PFsense box I've ever built. It has a VGA and USB port on the front if I ever need to get at it that way, and while I am unsure of the power consumption, at $250ish, I'm very happy with it (I recently installed the NUT package and now the PFsense box is even talking to my UPS–thanks to this list!). When it comes to work (or if I weren't inclined to assemble the system mentioned above), I always specify products from netgate or pfsense, because they 'just work' and the support is awesome. On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 6:13 AM, Karl Fife <[email protected]> wrote: > Honestly that j1900 looks like a really great choice. > > I think the right questions would be whether you can tolerate the VGA > console, whether it will cost more in terms of power consumption, whether > you need the AES-NI instructions. I was going to mention ECC ram, but the > netgate box appears to be Non-ECC :-( > > Given the role and quantity of RAM, ECC would be a sensible choice IMO. > > > On 8/3/2016 11:00 AM, Ryan Coleman wrote: > >> And there are many people on the list here who have vouched for the J1900 >> box mentioned earlier. >> >> I am pretty sure we’ve vetted it; I know I have and I am going to start >> deploying it at customer sites over NetGate hardware. >> >> >> On Aug 3, 2016, at 10:58 AM, Karl Fife <[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>> +1 >>> >>> You can buy the 'blessed' hardware alone (e.g. CentOS) from netgate for >>> $300 (2-port) and $350 (4-port). Cheaper than if you buy a preconfigured >>> pfSense appliance with support. Seems like REALLY inexpensive insurance to >>> be using vetted hardware that others are also using. In general, I >>> consider cheap networking gear to be a false economy. >>> >> _______________________________________________ >> pfSense mailing list >> https://lists.pfsense.org/mailman/listinfo/list >> Support the project with Gold! https://pfsense.org/gold >> > > _______________________________________________ > pfSense mailing list > https://lists.pfsense.org/mailman/listinfo/list > Support the project with Gold! https://pfsense.org/gold _______________________________________________ pfSense mailing list https://lists.pfsense.org/mailman/listinfo/list Support the project with Gold! https://pfsense.org/gold
