routeros

pfSense – A move to an easier life?

by

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.

1 Week on

by

I’ve had Zen’s FTTP 900 product now for just over a week and whilst I’d love to say so far I’ve absolutely thrashed it, sadly I’ve been caught out with a bout of Covid (first time) so wanting to protect the family I moved out into isolation for a week. this meant I wasn’t at home and able to use the connection but the family were still benefitting from multiple streams but I also benefitted vastly from the enhanced upload.

Having nothing to do but stare at walls, I worked my way though a load of my old Plex content, streaming the original files was an absolute breeze and regularly I was peaking 20Mb of upload bandwidth and that was fairly consistent across most of the days I was away. No issues there.

Hopefully I’ll have something a bit better to be able to trumpet about the amazing new connectivity.

Go Gig or Go Home

by

Install day was today and I’ve finally gone to FTTP. Installation was an absolute breeze, I’d put in a draw cord to get the fibre into the house and the Openreach engineer even took down the copper as well so nice and tidy. I have a neat little ONT in my house next to the living room patch ports and we are running a CHR with Gb internet.

Before install from a wired in connection during a working day.
Following install but before ONT upgrade
After ONT upgrade and a PPP drop and reconnect, this was Steam downloading a game on my CHR.

As you can see, the move wasn’t flawless, following the upgrade, my download speed held at the 55Mb I was profiled at previously but following an ONT firmware upgrade and then a PPP disconnect and reconnect from the CHR, we released the full power. My laptop couldn’t even manage to get the throughput due to the USB dock for a speedtest so a Steam download on the main gaming/editing PC was in order to show it off.