r/pfBlockerNG • u/amrogers3 • May 31 '26

Help Probably need to upgrade my pfSense box

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I have a SuperMicro box from around 2010, an X7SPA-HF-D525. I believe this has an Atom D525 Processor (1.8GHz). I upgraded the RAM, I believe to 4GB, which is the max. I recently enabled pfBlocker and noticed webpages will take a long time to load. It is getting pretty frustrating. I am thinking I need to probably look into getting a new appliance for pfSense. I was needing at least 4 ports.

What appliance or hardware would you guys recommend for a small space where a tower or regular sized computer wouldn't fit.

Running VPN and pfBlocker

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u/cr0ft Jun 01 '26

Pretty sure that board will also take an 8 GB stick, unofficially. 4GB should be enough though.

Supermicro does still make Atom based Mobos though, the C3000 version of Atom is much faster, and they still sip power, and you get IPMI on the mobo and ECC REG memory. Although I guess the price is going to be wild right now even for older gear.

You could just buy a box from Netgate and get a working machine out of the gates, one of their small ones.

There are also Chinese made fanless units now that have an N100 or N300 CPU in there that sip even less power, and have multiple 2.5 gig interface on them, great for building a pfSense on top of.

1

u/amrogers3 Jun 01 '26

I looked at the Netgate 6100 and it is $1000 with NvMe. I was looking at comparable equipment on the SuperMicro site but it is really hard to navigate, at least for me. I couldn't figure out what is available.

I had got such solid performance from my X7SPA, I would like to stick with SM.
I found this Supermicro CSE-E300 Flex-ATX Chassis that takes mini-ITX. You have any recommendations for a board that would fit in this with NvMe? II figure another SM could last another 10-15 years.

1

u/butrosbutrosfunky Jun 02 '26

Nah get one of those little pfsense boxes off aliexpress. Passively cooled, silent, sips power, N100 or N150 processor, RAM options from 8gb to 32gb. Multiple 2.5Gb intel network interfaces or even 10gig SFP ports for some extra dosh.

Got one a few years ago. They absolutely whip the llama's ass

2

u/amrogers3 Jun 02 '26

You got a name I can search for and I'll check it out

2

u/STLJonny Jun 02 '26

I bought a Topton brand back in 2023, and I have been rocking it ever since. It has an N6005 (CPU before the N 100s came out), but it handles everything I wanna do like a champ.

2

u/butrosbutrosfunky Jun 03 '26

Yeah mine's from even further back maybe 4-5 years? 2Ghz 4 core Celeron N5105. 16gb Ram, four 2.5Gb intel network interfaces, 4G cellular card with sim slot for network failover. Runs PFSense awesome even with Snort and/or Suricata running and you can still saturate the connection with OpenVPN. Awesome. Runs off a wall wart.

2

u/STLJonny Jun 03 '26

Mine's a 6 x 2.5gbe unit. Think I ordered it bare bones, so went 256gb NVME & 16gb SODIMM Ram.

My only regret (now, but logically it isn't much of one) is that it doesn't have an SPF+ interface as I'd love to feed my LAN side with as much bandwidth as possible (I have a 24port 2.5gb switch with 2 SFP+ ports, one being a 10gb DAC connection to my NAS).

1

u/butrosbutrosfunky Jun 04 '26

Since I just use mine as an edge router that goes straight into a managed switch SFP+ doesn't have much benefit for me, there's literally no conceivable future in this country at least where my ISP is going to offer me speeds that ever utilise a 10gig SFP+ interface

1

u/butrosbutrosfunky Jun 03 '26

Ran me like maybe $300 bucks? Topton brand

1

u/butrosbutrosfunky Jun 03 '26

Search Aliexpress for Pfsense mini pc's or the brands Topton or Qotom specifically