I should also add, I need to keep this under $400, and preferably in the 200-300 range for our budget. unfortunately the 10 year old staff PCs HAD to be replaced due to new system software that ran too slow on the old ones. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to virtualize, but this year we needed both new staff PCs and new server hardware, but couldn't get both. I will be doing regular images of the firewall and have a backup hard drive with the most recent image on it just in case, along with regularly exporting the config files. And like some others have said, I feel like virtualizing our sole network firewall would be a bad idea. All of our servers run on extremely old school single core CPUs, so virtualizing this won't be an option. Our network is fairly small, and, being government funded (and by that I mean our funding was cut in half a few years back) extremely outdated. This means that you can actually recycle the old machine & not rely on old HW as your HA option. Have you considered making this a P-to-V conversion? Or, even if you start with a fresh installation, making sure that you build a virtual machine for this, even if you make it the only VM on the new chassis? This way, if it does go down, all it would take is to replace/purchase another chassis, install (your flavor of) virtualization software & crank up your existing VM. The cost of a 16gb card and reader is going to be under $50. Regarding storage, i don't know PFSense, but i assume it does audit logs, that's something that needs it's own storage, so i personally would toss a drive in there, but if that feature isn't important or isn't available, you would be fine running off of a flash drive or SD card. You COULD go with Astaro Opens a new window (Sophos UTM Essentials) but honestly you're a bit too big for the essential version. Grand total should be roughly $500 and you've got yourself a stylish setup. ![]() Toss in two sticks of KVR Opens a new window.Īnd for storage you could get a pair of these Opens a new window and mirror them, or if you're not keen on refurb drives (or don't care about a mirror) toss in a cheap and cheerful spinpoint Opens a new window. This Opens a new window will do you just fine.Ī G8xx Opens a new windowSeries Pentium is fine, but opt for the i3 Opens a new window if the budget allows. ![]() ![]() Seconding SAM's suggestion of a rackmount. I'll be managing the firewall exclusively through the web console. So, what do you guys recommend for a computer? Our network is fairly small, with maybe 200 users at most, and that is including 50 or so from our wireless nodes. I'll keep the old one around as a temporary backup if anything happens to the new one. So my plan is to purchase a new, very cheap, basic computer with no OS and install PfSense (or something similar, I'm somewhat used to PfSense now, but if there are better alternatives I am open to that) and setting it up some Sunday when we are closed so that there will be no disruption of service for staff or patrons. It's getting old though, and I know that someday it will kick the bucket, and the idea of our network going offline until I get a new firewall installed, or just connected to the internet with no firewall, is a scary prospect. The previous sysadmin here set up a rather old, used PC with PfSense firewall and OpenBSD, which we have been using for quite some time.
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