hardware

pfSense+ vs opnSense – Is it a competition?

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I was recently caught out by the whole pfSense+ is going to be chargeable going forwards scandal that I’m sure many other pfSense users have been, I’ve kerbed my outrage, it’s not life ending, I moved from CE to Plus only a month before this happened and to be honest, apart from the inconvenience of reinstalling to move back – I can live with it howevere there is a similar alternative, a fork of the pfSense build. OPNsense.
Link to said announcement.

What a nightmare that’s been!!
I had it in my mind to swap the SSD my Dell R210 was running on anyway so whipped out the old Crucial and popped in a new one, installed OPN sense and that’s where the problems all started! Huge memory spikes (filling the 8GB hardware and 8GB swap), the firewall then proceeded to drop some services due to the memory being so high, CPU spiking to 60% plus randomly for periods. VLANs not working and I use a LAGG setup for my downlinks to LAN (I can so I do) also not coming up when needed meaning I had a situation where I managed to lock myself out due to the LAGG not coming up, a reset to factory and then start config again. Just a general nightmare.

Sat contemplating my poor life decisions, I remebered I swapped out the SSD in full, what had taken me the best part of 2 and a half hours, was reverted in a shutdown, SSD swap and power up (30 seconds max) to resume normality. Yes I have a CE reinstall to do and it does bug me I never get 1Gb any more only 850Mb (first world problem) but I am going to concentrate now on moving the interfaces to the built in ethernet and swap out the PCiE card for something 10Gb flavour.

I have read so much up on moving pf to opn and I was super excited to do so but pf for me is currently still where it’s at.

New Hardware Incoming!

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I’ve got some really exciting hardware changes coming up which I’m hoping are going to help me along my quest to make better YT videos! I will be saying goodbye to spinning discs completely in my main rig and will be migrating to NVME for OS with the “old” SSD being the new recording drive for super fast writes to enable me to get bandwidth up and help with post recording cutting and shutting.

In addition to that there will be some sound upgrades which are probably going to be less of an impact on the videos but still. Upgrades are upgrades.

MikroTik Router OS 6.41

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MikroTik have released their version 6.41 of the current build. Whilst there are some new features the most obvious one now is the removal of the master-slave relationship ability to allow hardware switching. MikroTik have done this in a bid to simplify the configuration meaning that now you can use the bridge functionality.

Previously bridging was all done through the CPU so switching on lower end hardware meant that you may not always get full speeds and often ended up with a 100% CPU utilization for a simple file transfer.

MikroTik have now made it so that you can add single, multiple or all ports into a bridge with a check box available to take advantage of the “hardware offload” function. Again, whilst not technically a new feature for the series, it is a redesigned way of achieving hardware switching. The result is a brilliantly clean implementation which resulted in the following from my testing on an older gigabit router.

hwoffloadtest