Posts

Showing posts from August, 2020

Realtek driver update for pfSense

Image
If you read into pfSense and hardware it supports, you will stumble over users reporting that Realtek ethernet hardware is not very well supported and can be buggy or slow. I had the same experience with my MiniPC I bought from China, read the review   here . But I found a solution that was easy to setup and really works well. This is the post I’m referring to: https://forum.netgate.com/topic/135850/official-realtek-driver-binary-1-95-for-2-4-4-release How to: download the driver here upload driver into pfSense. I use Cyberduck to SSH into pfSense. Unzip & Place “if_re.ko” file at “/boot/kernel” Change ownership and permissions on the if_re.ko file cd /boot/kernel chown root:wheel if_re.ko chmod 0555 if_re.ko Then edit “/boot/loader.conf”. You will need to use the vi editor, since the nano editor, which I think is much easier to use, is not installed.: vi /boot/loader.conf add the following line to the end: if_re_load=“YES” Reboot. Then go to  diagnostics  >  command prompt  in

pfSense fanless MiniPC review

Image
I bought a cheap   fanless Topton  MiniPC  from Aliexpress to set up a spare pfSense firewall, in case my pfSense VM is not running. The price was around 85€ including free shipping. The thing finally arrived after 6 weeks, but packaging was still ok and nothing damaged. The MiniPC I ordered did not come with SSD or RAM. You can configure it to include RAM and/or SSD, but you don’t know what they put into it until you received the package. I equipped the PC with 4GB of DDR3L 1600MHz SO-Dimm RAM. 2GB or even 1GB will be enough for most private use cases with pfSense, but since these memory modules are cheap… The 4GB RAM module I bought was around 18€. For storage I decided to use a Transcend MSata SSD 16GB ultradurable MLC NAND Flash. 16GB is plenty of space for pfSense, 8GB would also be fine. But the stuff is cheap, 21€. You can also use a SATA-DOM, there’s an onboard SATA and power connector. Installation of pfSense is simple. Just flash the downloaded image on a USB stick and boot i

Allnet VDSL Bridge Modem ALL-BM200VDSL2V

Image
This is a review of the Allnet VDSL Bridge Modem ALL-BM200VDSL2V. I would like to share my experience, because I think it has some flaws, that makes it not very useful with VDSL lines with bandwidth over 80mbit. In my case the modem was connected to a german DSL line (1&1 over Telekom) that is capable of around 115mbit download and 40mbit upload. So why the problem? If you look at the specs, you can see that the LAN connection is a 100Mbit port: Features: 1x RJ-45 10/100Mbps LAN Supports G.993.5 Vectoring Interoperable with major VDSL2 chipsets Supports up to VDSL2 profie 30a Supports up to 100 Mbps symmetric Looks good so far, but unfortunately my bandwidth is capped at about 85mbit download speed. I assume, that this is due to the 100mbit Ethernet LAN port. So I just bought a DrayTek Vigor 165 Supervectoring/VDSL2/ADSL2+ Modem. This one has a gigabit LAN port, actually has two. Now I get the full 100mbit that I pay for. Read a review about the DrayTek here . Nevertheless both mod

SSD size for hybrid pools in TrueNAS 12

Image
I was just playing around with the BETA1 of TrueNAS 12. So I built a pool from 2x 1TB rust and a 240GB SSD for the meta data. Standard lz4 compression. Question is, how much of SSD space do you need for a meta data SSD? I copied about 9.87GB of small files to the new hybrid zPool. The file count in macOS was 9642. The files were mostly from my mac, many small files: Text documents, apps, stuff you have on your hard drive. I tried to mainly copy small files to the pool, to get like the “worst case”. If I look at iostat I get the following allocation: mirror 9.72Gb (2x 1TB HDD) special 0.156Gb (SSD 240Gb with meta data) The meta data on the SSD uses around 1,6% of the total pool usage. Correct me if I calculated something wrong, but that is not very much! 🤓 This is a factor of 63,31. So in theory, if you fill up the drive with the same ratio of file size, a 240GB SSD would be sufficient for a 15TB pool! If I look at my FreeNAS pool, my files are much bigger in average. I use 4x 4TB WD R