pfBlockerNG resources - catagories

Networking & Firewalls
1

Hi,

Just looking at pfsense again and setting up pfBlockerNG, having hit and miss success with it. I’m looking to do category blocking. I understand this is a CPU and RAM hog and unrealistic for a small box setup? My CPU is an Intel ® Atom ™ E3845 and 8GB, but I do have a Sophos XG appliance with upto 16GB available.

It was the porn categories I was looking to block etc, which I previously did with Untangle. Untangle doesn’t have the slickness of some of the configuration items and I think the purchase by Arista hasn’t gone well.

My other line of thought is using a forwarding provider that can do this etc. opendns etc.

As it’s home use I may still revert to Sophos XG.

2

If you enable the python module for dns then the resource utilization goes way down for pfblockerng. I personally load a ton of lists on a custom built pfsense box with an i5. Looking at it right now I have 1% cpu utilization and 6% used out of 16GB of ram. I have about 30-40 servers and workstations and misc devices all using pfblockerng. Just to give you an idea.