Viable option for pFsense hardware?

Computer Hardware & Server Infrastructure Builds
1

Hi, I am looking at moving my pFsense from a VM to a physical machine. I am looking at the following option: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005104562987.html.

Looking at the required specs, 4GB Ram with 64GB SSD should be fine. The part I am not sure about is if I go for the N4000 or j4125 option. The N4000 (besides being a great price) appears to have what is needed (when considering the min specs listed for pFsense).

Comparisons are here: N4000 vs J4125 [15-Benchmark Showdown] (technical.city).

Besides using all interfaces, pFsense will have the following running: Radius, Tailgate, pfblocker & HA Proxy.

Just a few questions:

  • Will the N4000 be fine or should I choose the j4125?
  • Should I get more ram?
  • Should I get a larger disk?

Is there something else that I might be missing or still need to consider when looking at the above?

2

Personally I would buy that unit barebones and add my own RAM and SSD from somewhere decent, if you don’t already have any lying around then I would simply buy the max the unit can take just so that it’s more useful if it needs to be repurposed. I have a chinese box and it’s been running for a couple of years without any issues, the CPU and RAM have never been an issue.

I would say at these prices I would buy two units, keeping one as a backup but I suppose in the event of a failure you would switch over to your vm. Though having identical units you’ll have far fewer issues.

3

Agree with the above, the memory and ssd will the cheapest.

Purchase your own memory and ssd

4

I was running a j4125 unit with 4GB of RAM and a 64GB drive. It was OK. I just recently replaced it with a N100 unit with 16GB of RAM (only because I had an extra 16GB dimm hanging around). I think the hard drive size is not so critical, but I would opt for more RAM. The default install for pfSense now is ZFS. It never hurts to make more ram available to ZFS. Plus if you want to run other apps in pfsense (suricata, snort, pfBlocker NG, etc.) the system will require more RAM.

I am not seeing any difference in routing performance with the faster CPU, but the sytem sure boots up a lot faster, and the web UI is a LOT snappier.

5

I was going to say N100 or N5105 are the lowest I’m looking at right now. That said I have older stuff that I’m currently using but looking towards an upgrade. I wasn’t really happy with my J4105 computer, but it also had Realtek NICs so that might have been part of the problem. With the extra services running, the faster N100 or N5105 will be better.

8gb minimum, 16 gb better. I’d probably go up to a 128gb disk, just to have a little room for logging (if needed in the future).

6

Do not purchase any devices with Realtek network cards, if you intent to use pfsense or xcp-ng

Use devices with intel network cards