I am looking for hardware for my firewall:
- 1 GBit connection WAN
- up to 2.5 GBit LAN
- Up to 70 devices
- Zenarmor should run on it in the $99 version
- 2 to 4 Ethernet ports
A mini PC that doesn't consume so much power would be nice. Maybe even without a fan?
I was thinking of 16 GB RAM.
CPU: N100 or N305. Is an N100 enough?
Do you have any specific hardware suggestions? Gladly from Amazon...or Aliexpress?
Cheers, Doctor
Another question:
for the network topology as described above:
Is an N100 sufficient, or do I need an N305 (i3)?
Considering Zenarmor, then I would throw the fastest clock speed processor possible at it. I would probably lean towards the N305 and 16GB of ram.
The AMD V1756b in my HP T740 had no problems with gigabit transfers Lan to Opt, I don't have any 2.5gbps for testing. I think it might benchmark a bit higher than an N100 and certainly draws more power than the N100. 40 odd simultaneous users were not a problem for the T740 when I had it running during testing, eventually replaced with a Xeon based Supermicro server after freeing it from other duties. The T740 never got hot in use and would give me about 600-700mbps across the Lan with suricata and zenarmor and crowdsec all running. My Xeon machine is a little faster, but it also has a higher clock and faster ECC ram with greater interleave on the RAM (all 4 slots).
Hopefully that will give you a little data you can use to compare with benchmarks for your processor. All that said, I'd look at a faster AMD, or the N305 if it were me and needing the 2.5gbps
The WAN is only connected with 1 Gbit. Then an N100 should be enough... the 2.5 Gbit traffic in the LAN doesn't usually go via the Opensense, does it?
Quote from: Doktor on October 09, 2024, 10:36:37 AM
The WAN is only connected with 1 Gbit. Then an N100 should be enough... the 2.5 Gbit traffic in the LAN doesn't usually go via the Opensense, does it?
Correct, it goes through your switch only.
It does if you have multiple LAN and use OPNsense as the router, otherwise as mentioned, no.