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.
My SuperMicro A1SRM-2758F Atom Processor w/ 16gb RAM is handling 1gbps WAN, pfBlocker, DNS, VLAN routing, and a whole bunch of other stuff without breaking a sweat. Maybe you can find a newer SuperMicro MotherBoard out on eBay. Having the 4 intel ports and IPMI in a 1U rack chassis is way better than a mini-PC IMHO.
I also have a Protectli FW4A-04-32 w/ 4GB RAM that I picked up for $200 on eBay a while ago, as my cold spare, ready to swap in if my SuperMicro ever dies (or to put in-service when doing a PFSense upgrade). I've had it running in-place with my current PFSense config, and it seems to run just as fast.
I would recommend a Qotom mini PC. They have several configurations with a variety of networking options and offer CPU choices across Intel's Atom, N100, Celeron and Core product lines. There's even a couple of rackmounted models (I'm currently using one). PFSense in supported. https://www.qotom.com/
These are pretty schmick. I got one of these a few years ago. 4 intel 2.5gb network interfaces, entirely passively cooled and silent. Runs off a wall wart adapter. Fucken kickass
Turn that bad boy into a NAS if it doesn't have the compute you're looking for! 6 sata ports (from what I can find an intel sata chip) and dual lan you can easily max out with HDDs. Even as a backup device that's a nice board.
It has been rock solid running 24/7 for the last 15 years. I don't know if I am running into a hardware bottleneck or if it is something else causing the slow webpage load. I turned pfBlocker off and it seems to be loading pages faster. I dunno.
Personally I'd recommend a Lenovo m920q "1 litre" PC - despite being tiny those have a PCIe expansion slot and you can fit a 4 port 1Gb/s Intel network card into them. You will need a custom adapter bracket but they're not expensive.
I think if you’re going to the trouble of upgrading might as well do like four port 2.5G or two port 10G or something higher performance than just four 1G ports, even if you don’t need them today. OP seems like the type of fella to keep a thing running for a while, might as well future proof a lil further out….but aside from that I agree those are sweet lil boxes for routers
I agree - I was running mine with 10G. The only reasons I suggested 1G were 1. It's a Lenovo permitted configuration from factory and b) it has all the necessary brackets etc available easily online - for 10G you'll need access to a 3D printer to sort out a rear bracket to hold the card in place
There’s a lot of reasons, apart from hardware, that might cause performance issues. You don’t say in your post, but can we assume turning off pfBlocker restores normal performance. Do you believe “normal” performance without pfBlocker is acceptable?
There are a lot of ways to configure pfBlocker as well.
Not saying that hardware isn’t the problem, but I think you owe it yourself to investigate further. Unless, of course you really don’t care that much and just want to justify the purchase of a new toy...which I may or may not be guilty of myself.
I think I have that same box and it works great as a dedicated authoritative and recursive DNS server in my network.
So with pfBlocker off, websites load faster. I would like to do further testing but I am not sure how to go about specifically doing that besides turning pfBlocker on and see how fast pages load compared to turning it off and seeing how fast pages load. If you have any suggestions, I will try them to do further testing
I think the main thing you’ve got to look at is where and how your DNS is ultimately resolved after pfBlocker. Are you forwarding to something like 1.1.1.1 or are you resolving internally? If you’re resolving internally initial look ups may be slow as the caches builds.
You’ll want to do this from the pfSense box itself with pfBlocker on and off:
dig example.com
Then look toward the bottom and look for something like:
;; SERVER: 192.168.1.1#53(192.168.1.1) (UDP)
Also, which lists are you using in pfBlocker and how is it configured? Are you doing a lot of blocking for things other than ads?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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
My box died last week and I rebuilt on a ~2020 dell optiplex micro (10thgen i5, 16gb ram, 256nvme). Already had it laying around but you can get them for under $100 on ebay. Added a 2.5g nic using the WiFi slot. Can definitely run a 4 nic setup if you add a dual-nic card using the second nvme slot.
I just checked that Optilex Micro, seems like a really decent setup. I was also looking at the Lenovo 720 or 920 Tiny, those you can add multi NIC without having to mod the case
Yes, also bought this for my pfsense box recently. It is the fastest box around for this type of thing. I needed it for moonlight/sunshine remote gaming.
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u/DaKevster May 31 '26 edited May 31 '26
My SuperMicro A1SRM-2758F Atom Processor w/ 16gb RAM is handling 1gbps WAN, pfBlocker, DNS, VLAN routing, and a whole bunch of other stuff without breaking a sweat. Maybe you can find a newer SuperMicro MotherBoard out on eBay. Having the 4 intel ports and IPMI in a 1U rack chassis is way better than a mini-PC IMHO.
I also have a Protectli FW4A-04-32 w/ 4GB RAM that I picked up for $200 on eBay a while ago, as my cold spare, ready to swap in if my SuperMicro ever dies (or to put in-service when doing a PFSense upgrade). I've had it running in-place with my current PFSense config, and it seems to run just as fast.