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Pfsense spec - locks Heath build coming

Mikeys

Regular Member
Toob are going live in Locks Heath during this year and my Virgin connection is up in December.

What spec hardware are people using on pfsense. I’m using vpns on my setup, S2S to a family member, OpenVpN for laptop and wireguard for mobiles.

I watch a fair amount of plex when I’m away from home, so would leverage the improved upload compared to my 500/50 current connection.

Using an ex Sophos XG135 Rev3 atm mo with QAT support.
 
I'm using one of them fanless mini PCs running PFsense with a N5105 & 8GB RAM on a 1000/115 PPPoE connection, 2x C2S OVPNs and works perfectly fine for me

EDIT: Added OS
 
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Me personally, I run a Lenovo M720Q mini-PC with an i5-9400T in it, and 64GB RAM and a hypervisor... pfSense then has 4 cores and 8GB RAM to run on, and I know for a fact that'll route 1Gbps in/out with no problems. It'll be fine until the day I can go above a Gbps as it's only got a single 1Gbps NIC so doing everything on a stick for now. After that I will either move to another machine that has 10Gbps NIC's or figure out how I can shoehorn one into the 9400T, may well do that, or a 2.5Gbps NIC perhaps. I've options anyway :)
 
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I'm using opnsense with Toob on a fw4b which has a j3160 cpu and 16GB RAM. With this I have a couple of wireguard and tailscale connections and it doesn't seem to struggle at all, I get full 900/900 (only around 500 on wireguard however, this seems to be a cpu limitation). I'm not running IDS or anything like that and never intended to so my performance requirements were low. The thing I really like about the fw4b is its low power usage, it idles around 6w and peaks at 8w. My whole nas/media/firewall/cctv setup uses around 45w idle and 60w peak.
 
I watch a fair amount of plex when I’m away from home, so would leverage the improved upload compared to my 500/50 current connection.

If you don't know already Toob uses CGNAT so to get a routable IPv4 address you need to pay them an extra £8/month. I was doing this for some time until another member on here mentioned ionos do a £1/month VPS offering, so I use this instead to route Ipv4 traffic on port 443 on the VPS directly to my firewall via wireguard and then port forward to nginx proxy on the mediaserver. I then set up a domain which points to the VPS and added this to Plex custom network settings.

Works perfectly and I also added a v6 address to Plex so users can connect to my Plex directly using ipv6 or indirectly using v4, depending on what their client supports/chooses.
 
I'm using opnsense with Toob on a fw4b which has a j3160 cpu and 16GB RAM. With this I have a couple of wireguard and tailscale connections and it doesn't seem to struggle at all, I get full 900/900 (only around 500 on wireguard however, this seems to be a cpu limitation). I'm not running IDS or anything like that and never intended to so my performance requirements were low. The thing I really like about the fw4b is its low power usage, it idles around 6w and peaks at 8w. My whole nas/media/firewall/cctv setup uses around 45w idle and 60w peak.

My old Pondesk E3845 as it my parents handling their toob connection with a pfsense CE instance. They barely use the network and are on the standard CG-NAT/IPV6 package. S2S VPN back to my pfsense box.

My XG35 Rev3 is around 20w and my XG230 Rev2 is about 30w, upto 50w if I fit the 10Gb fibre module. Both have pfsense plus license on them, but the X230 Rev2 only has IPsec-MB Crypto, which is fine. I've swapped the CPU from a G4400 to an i3-6100T.

Will decide which to keep. I've got a XG125 Rev 3 too, that's got pfsense 2.7.2 on it, but will put opnsense / XG Home on it to have a look again before probably selling off. I've explored Opnsense before, but just couldn't get on with UI, so I switched back to pfsense. XG Home has positives again, I prefer the firewall rule structure on that, but there isn't let's encrypt or wireguard, so I'd have to host them on something else, which isn't a prob as I have a Dell PowerEdge T340 running vMware ESXi 8 (need to switch to something else).

My power usage tbh is far too much.

Both the XG135 and XG230 are in a rack in the loft, gets a bit warm, but kit handled it so far.

I'll have a look at the ionos VPS, many thanks. I was going to look at tailscale at some point, haven't looked at that all, so don't know the suitability. However I expect by the time I factor anything like that, just pay the £8..
 
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Tailscale would work and is incredibly easy to set up but the default option would require the tailscale client to be running on your end device to access plex. I think tailscale offer a service that assists with opening ports if you wanted that instead called 'tailscale funnel' but I haven't bothered looking in to it.
 
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Tailscale would work and is incredibly easy to set up but the default option would require the tailscale client to be running on your end device to access plex. I think tailscale offer a service that assists with opening ports if you wanted that instead called 'tailscale funnel' but I haven't bothered looking in to it.

Just been testing this and learning it this week after I updated pfsense to 24.03. There is a tailscale plugin for pfsense.

Due to Toob's "advertised 900/900, I'll be using more full tunnel configs on the VPN rather than split tunnel.

Been using plexamp quite a bit for streaming music from home and works all fine. I'm just looking at moving Plex from a QNAP I have to a virtual machine with GPU passthrough, proxmox. Shame not vmware anymore, but Broadcom burning that to the ground.

I don't rec Toob will be ready come December for our area, just a hunch.

Need to send back a Ultra Cloud Gateway / sell if off, not unboxed it yet.

Hopefully can get solar this year too to offset my elec draw lol
 
N100 on my current pfSense unit which I have been setting up for last hour or 2.

On PPPoE it should handle gigabit fine, but given how close PPPoE pushed my older unit, I think it wouldnt be adequate for 2.5gbit services. Yayzi 2.5gbit would be fine as thats IPoE.

The N100 is now also using 2500base-t to both ONT and switch as well, so I guess my lan is now partially 2,5gbit now.

From what I have looked at with wireguard I think the unit could handle gigabit speeds with wireguard, but I havent tested it.

Still got VM going through the old unit, and will probably be like that until VM expires, and then the unit will be retired.
 
 
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Not expecting Toob to be live in my Lockd Heath / Park Gate area before my end of contract in Dec 24.

Certainly takes time for build to happen. Seen City Fibre, Toob and BT doing various work around my area.

I’m also in an area with no poles in my close, so again different delivery.
 
Toob are going live in LH/PG in the week commencing 8th. July this year. Some can already order. Pretty fast build and rollout, to be fair. So now, there's full fibre from OR and Toob. Not before time.
 
Toob are going live in LH/PG in the week commencing 8th. July this year. Some can already order. Pretty fast build and rollout, to be fair. So now, there's full fibre from OR and Toob. Not before time.

Ok fingers crossed as I'm East side of Hunts Pond road, so still marked in yellow.

 
Oh I see, over Titchfield Common way then. I don't see much planned fibre activity by Toob over your way on the onenetwork map at the moment but our build (area has now gone red on Toob's map) first popped up in mid March and work started a couple of weeks later. So it took 3 months to get to first orders and will have been another 2 weeks on top, to the first installations.

https://one.network/ is the best place to monitor developments.
 
Many thanks for the link. I'm not expecting to be leaving Virgin come December and I've read more providers locking people in for 24 months.

Dibbles corner, so indeed doesn't look great.

I have been using Better Internet Dashboard.
 
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