Comment by chrissnell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrissnell | Hacker News Reader

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If you're willing to pay "decent money" for a router with auto-update, get some PC hardware (even as small as a WRAP or Soekris) and run pfSense. You'll never look back. I love OpenWRT but a $100 Netgear or Linksys device just can't touch a real PC motherboard with Intel NICs.

My preferred pfSense platform at both home and the office is a server-grade chassis running ESXi. My router runs in a VM on this server and I use vSwitches to connect the VM to the various ports on the 4-port Intel NIC.

I just built it like this for convenience (I already had the ESXi server) but I later found a side-benefit: if you've set up a DMZ on pfSense, you can easily attach VMs to the DMZ by associating them with the DMZ vSwitch. So, I have some untrusted VMs sitting in my DMZ and trusted VMs sitting on my LAN...all on the same piece of hardware.

I've been running this way since 2013 and it's been flawless and fast. More details here:

http://output.chrissnell.com/post/39550480075/the-jack-of-al...

How much power does that use? I run linux a firewall/router on an older laptop + usb ethernet(2) and it's about 20w. I'd prefer < 10. Perhaps I need to try Raspberry Pi next.

The Raspberry Pi is gonna suck as a router due to the "Ethernet on USB". You'd be much happier with one of the boards that chrissnell mentioned above.

Personally, I use a "Maxxwave 1106" running BSD I had laying around but it's on the more expensive side. If I was putting something together for myself, I'd get one of the small Atom boards with a couple of onboard Intel NICs.

I've been running OpenWRT on an PC Engines APU board (4 core x86 based w/ gigabit ethernet). According to the website[1] the power is "About 6 to 12W of 12V DC power depending on CPU load." Before my APU I ran an Alix board[2] for years.

It's a little bit more complicated to get running since it requires a custom compiled OpenWRT, but it's great to have more memory and disk space than I'll ever need in my router. I used to run on OpenWRT on reflashed consumer routers and I always had to be real careful about what I installed and ran. With the APU I can just install real `bash` and `less` and not have to deal with the crappy busybox emulations.

[1] http://pcengines.ch/apu.htm

[2] http://pcengines.ch/alix.htm

I have been running an IPcop firewall on an old PC for ages with three network cards. Just about to replace it with this small thing, also with IPcop, and it runs on a 4 watt power supply. I have realised that by downsizing my servers etc in the basement, now when they are a bit overkill (moved most stuff to a cloud solution) I can save enough electricity to power an electric car for most of the use I would make of it with what I save.

http://www.firewallhardware.it/en/alix_pfsense_embedded.html

As mentioned, the ethernet interface is too slow for this. One could use one of the BananaPi variants for that, afaik there is one which has four independent ethernet ports for use as a router.

I use a standard BananaPi as NAS and are very satisfied with it. It comes with a SATA interface and 1Gb ethernet.

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