New toy!

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Sasquatch
Posts: 155
Joined: 26. Mar 2014, 00:50

New toy!

Post by Sasquatch »

Today I spent a whopping $25 (US) on an HP DC5750. It came with Linux Mint 17.x installed but the plan is to convert it into a PfSense router for the first step in my home network adventure. Stock, it has a 2.3 Ghz AMD Athlon 64 X2 CPU. I plan to upgrade that to a 3.1 Ghz processor for another $27 or so via Newegg. The board currently has 4 GB of ram, but I noticed it has two different types. So I'll probably replace that as well. I figure I'll max it out at the 8 GB the CPU is capable of recognizing. I know that's way more than a router needs. But it might come in handy and it won't be very expensive. I'll upgrade the HD too so I can do caching right on the router. I figure the whole thing could be built for right around $150. It won't be much as far as computers go. But as far as routers go it should be pretty impressive.

I'm also seriously looking at using an onboard ADSL modem card instead of an external modem. Mainly because I like having everything in one box when possible. But there aren't many options for that and they are fairly expensive. Since the only DSL modem I have at the moment tops out at 100 MB I'll probably need to upgrade it fairly soon if we want to do any streaming.

The rest of the network will follow eventually. Since it's just the wife and I, we won't need a huge network. I plan on an HTPC, a Wi-Fi hotspot, a SAN or NAS (if I ever figure out the difference), and a workstation for my digital art. So a quad-port NIC should be sufficient. The board has a single PCIe x16 slot and a couple other PCI slots. I may use one of the slots for an SSD for the OS to partition it from the HD. Maybe in the more distant future I'll add some home automation and security features. But by then I may be ready to upgrade this system anyhow.

I'm very new to networking. So if anybody has any thoughts on the subject I'd be very glad to hear them.
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maximus
Posts: 141
Joined: 2. Sep 2009, 01:41

Re: New toy!

Post by maximus »

Seeing you mentioned pfsense, have a look at opnsense:

https://opnsense.org/

I've played with this a bit on an older HP workstation with a Core 2 Duo, it worked fine. Nice web-based GUI.
Sasquatch
Posts: 155
Joined: 26. Mar 2014, 00:50

Re: New toy!

Post by Sasquatch »

That looks interesting. I'll give it a shot. I need to make some upgrades to the box before I install anything. A router with a single LAN connection isn't much use. I'll be adding a 4-port LAN card and a Wi-Fi card along with the rest of the upgrades.
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