esxi

pfSense – A move to an easier life?

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Even up to having the FTTP installed I was a MikroTik router through and through kidn of guy however running my CHR in the way I did meant some trade offs were made and my day to day work life forking further away from Mikrotik based or even theorised usage meant that my mind went that way for my home network as well. I did the unthinkable.

I’ve repurposed my DellR210ii which has been rebuilt with a Xeon E3-1220 v2, 8GB of RAM and an SSD. I also added in some Noctua fans to keep the noise down below a whisper as the rebuild meant it won’t be working hard as the whole install is now “bare metal” rather than the complexitiy of being virtualised.

Has it made a huge difference to my life? No. I still have a working router/firewall however it is now a decent GUI rather than an app that had to be levered onto my laptop (I’m also now a Mac boi) and to be honest the OpenVPN implementation has been a breeze to get working as has all of the firewalling and NAt rules as well as pushing on with trying to squeeze more from the LAN itself (10Gb backbone and tolerance).

I’ve gone for pfSense+ as it’s my home firewall and I qualify as such for the + usage FOC (for now) and I’m pretty happy with it. Time will tell but currently I don’t see me folding back to ESXi with a CHR running on top.

Less than a week

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We’ve just dropped below a week until my new FTTP service is scheduled for install. I’ve been doing a bit of prep work in anticipation as well, the CHR is back alive on a new server, low powered Xeon this time rather than monster. With the new efficiencies of RouterOS it’s now more capable than ever and I am “only” going to be pushing 1Gb max.

I’ve also upgraded it to ROSv7 so I can take advantage of the newer queueing algorithms, FQ_CoDel being the main one I wanted to get my hands on but I will try with CAKE once things have settled down although I hopeful that with a 1000/115 connection I shouldn’t need to QoS much of anything.

A breathe of life for the CHR

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There has been a glimmer of hope for the CHR. I’ve come across a donor R210 with a power supply that is in brilliant condition, installed the power supply and it burst back into life. A good hour getting ESXi re-installed to the SSD I’d wiped and then reloading a CHR image onto it then carefully copying over the config and it’s just about ready to bring back into service.

I’ll be sorry to part ways again with the Hex and the FastTrack setup but this time around with the CHR I’ll be going for a really big QoS tree build.