Pfsense on Blue Iris PC or Separate PC?

davej said:

Pea sized? That is a huge amount.

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I've always read between a BB to Pea size is what you want ... I error on the larger end of the spectrum since all the coolers I use get screwed down to the MB. I've never tried a smaller BB size but perhaps I'll do it, pull it in another week, and see how well it spread.

Yeah, I looked around and googled and "pea size" is now considered reasonable. I thought it was less than that.

Well the fan was working so it must just be a hotter processor or related to it's age and the thermal paste on the inside. An additional bay for SSD isn't worth double the power consumption and extra heat so I'll sell it and stick with the 3770 CPU for now.

crw030 said:

Keep us updated what you like and dislike with your tinkering. ...

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This isn't really what you had in mind but, I dislike Newegg Super Saver shipping. I forgot how that works and should've paid the extra three bux. It's definitely on the slow boat from wherever.

I am curious about pfSense cpu usage. Do you really have pfSense running successfully on your BI server?

davej said:

I am curious about pfSense cpu usage. Do you really have pfSense running successfully on your BI server?

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Since it’s running 24/7 I figured I might as well piggyback the two together than run an additional machine. At the moment the only downside I have is I’ve been transferring things between 3 different computers to test performance and efficiency and since pfSense isn’t on a dedicated box the internet goes down and kids are asking, “is WifFi back up yet? when will it be up?”. It would be handy to have dedicated hardware so all my tinkering happens behind the router and is transparent to everybody else. After I’ve got things setup I don’t plan for a lot of tinkering but if I find this becomes an issue then I’d consider a dedicated machine for pfSense or running it on 2 machines in High Availability so it falls over to the other machine whenever I need to reboot one of them.

pfSense doesn’t use a whole lot of CPU, seems to fluctuate between 1-10% , and I’ve allocated 1GB RAM. That said, besides OpenVPN, I’ve not yet configured add-ons like squid, snort, suricata, or anything which would likely bump the CPU up an unknown amount. But since I can run 6 cams with H265 at ~20% CPU, I’m not at all worried about it impacting performance. If anything, I may change from motion recording to 24/7 and also could change to H264 if I needed extra performance.

The problem is: don't most of those things run on Linux while BI runs on Win10? So you have to run them inside a VM?

Correct. I initially started by adding a quad port NIC to my PC and installing pfSense inside VirtualBox. Once I tested it, realized I was going to use it long term, I installed Proxmox, and virtualized pfSense and Windows 10. While others have recommended against this, I’ve had no issues but of course YMMV.

For me, I don’t live in a bad neighborhood or have much crime so I figured I’d run things this way and if I have issues I can always make a dedicated Windows 10 machine but I’ve been running virtualized for about a month now and have had no issues.

The way my HVAC burns electricity I don't think I will notice an extra 75w pc running.

I know they sell devices which only consume 3W for running pfSense but I figured why spend $150 on another device when I can simply add pfSense to an existing computer which is always on. I’d much rather spend the $150 on something else like the 8TB wWD EasyStore I just picked up for my Plex library.

I would have thought of a Raspberry Pi, but they only have one ethernet port.

I have 3 Raspberry Pi 3’s but as I understand it, the Ethernet port would be a bottleneck. I’m not certain but I think you can add an additional through USB but even that would be a bottleneck.

This is also where VLANs would work to use one single port but again I believe it’s only a 100Mbps port.

bugsysiegals said:

I know they sell devices which only consume 3W for running pfSense but I figured why spend $150 on another device

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I get your point to having more hardware to buy, I feel the same when I'm testing things out, but a dedicated box for critical devices still makes sense to me, so on that we can disagree. For me it's just a too many eggs in a single basket concern.

I would only consider having a VM setup as a standby device (for cutover due to hardware failure or maintenance) because I can't be without internet while I wait on parts (work remote), but an alternative could easily be an ASUS router/firewall from Best Buy also.

At the time I was gung-ho and thought I'd be all over Deep Packet Inspection and stuff so I went overboard with an Intel i3 SFF, seriously overboard, CPU has to my knowledge never reached 10%. The route @Whoaru99 is going with an ASRock J4105B-ITX board and an Intel 4-port NIC would be how I would do it if I built another pfSense box, or possibly just a sub-$100 i3-SFF refurb off eBay.

Just compare your requirements to the guide on their website: Hardware — Hardware Sizing Guidance to make sure your processor can handle whatever you plan to throw at it.

Well, I don't know what to think. Pc's have never been thought of as good "real-time" devices, because they sometimes get busy doing something else, like refreshing dram, so I wonder if a wimpy pc could end up producing erratic ping times or something bad like that?

I can run a test if you’d like but my kids are gaming all the time and with 3 of them playing over WiFi simultaneously, I never notice any lag, and they don’t either.

I’ve never seen a problem, we usually have 5-6 gaming systems running most evenings, and I can drop a Speedtest into the mix and still see 2ms ping and 800Mb+ up&down (on the test) with no visible latency on the computers themselves.

And we’re not talking about a small network with 24 devices with DHCP leases, including 3 chromecasts.

crw030 said:

I would only consider having a VM setup as a standby device (for cutover due to hardware failure or maintenance) because I can't be without internet while I wait on parts (work remote), but an alternative could easily be an ASUS router/firewall from Best Buy also.

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This is exactly why I don't mind virtualization. I have a router on standby and if that dies I have BB 10 minutes away. That said, I'm still considering buying another 8300 for $215 and having a redundant machine on standby or perhaps even running both at the same time with Plex on one, BI on the other, and pfSense on both. There are literally so many options to choose from it really comes down to what's best for your personal use case and requirements.

I'm also considering buying something for NAS like a Synology or perhaps Dell/SuperMicro server which could also run VM's but these things consume some power!!

I’m considering selling my gaming computer and buying a Dell R720XD/SuperMicro X10 server to run my VM’s and hold 12-24 HDD’s for Plex video storage or adding something like a Dell PowerVault DAS to the HP 8300. Since I still have the gaming computer which holds 7 HDD’s, I figure I can start figuring out what kind of raid/redundancy I’d like, set it up now, and migrate it to a server once the gaming computer is sold, or just keep it until I run out of HDD room.

That said, I decided to install Proxmox on the gaming computer, restore Windows 10 VM backup from the 8300, and have it connected to my switch so it’s behind the 8300 pfSense router. This way if I decide to play with Plex, mess with Proxmox, and need to reboot, I’m not impacting anybody else in the house. I like this configuration much better and seeing that the 8300 consumes 30W, I’m probably going to find dedicated hardware for pfSense which uses 10W or less. At .13c per Watt, 24x7x365, that’s $23-$27 savings per year so a dedicated device pays for itself in 6 years and starts saving money thereafter which makes sense to me.

But what’s really interesting to me is that running my gaming computer virtualized rather than Windows 10 on bare metal is only consuming 70W with processing at 13-15%. My other tests were around 4-5pm with daylight and it’s dark now so I suspect the CPU will go up but I’m really curious to see if the power stays low since the HP 8300 was averaging 60-65W and the HP 4770 was around 90W just like this was before virtualizing. Does virtualizing lower power consumption? I’m going to check the CPU temp tomorrow and see how it compares to the HP 4770 just for fun.

Decided to be cautious and use a separate old Dell Optiplex SFF for pfSense. I am trying to watch these videos on version 2.3 even though I have installed 2.4... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agieD5uiwYY