A few months ago my home firewall, (pfsense) died, was built in an old Dell Optiplex 755 that I picked up second hand for about 300,000TZS (150USD), it had served me perfectly for over 2 years so was not too upset when it died. I threw in a Zyxel UG20 firewall device that I have had hanging around, and I have not been happy, but more on that in another blog post. So today I decided to go through some of the junk I have around to see if I could not build another pfsense firewall, anyone who knows me knows I have lots of junk. I settled on an old HP chassis I have, major overkill as its 8GB and even found a SSD in it. This used to be my primary workstation, (after our office was broken into about 10 years ago and my very very very special machine was stolem 🙁 ), it then became my home server, and then about 2 years ago was retired, (figured I at the time I would repurpose it, but did not think it would take this long).

So yes its major overkill for a home firewall, but I will put a whole bunch of other networking tools on it….

13:09

So firewall is installed and in place, now for some quick iperf tests but figure it might be worth documenting, (as I always have to do a refresher, on what to expect)…

The iperf test was run between the new pfsense server and one of the pfesense boxes that is only 5 hops away:

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Client connecting to X.X.X.X, TCP port 5131
TCP window size: 65.0 KByte (default)
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[  3] local Y.Y.Y.Y port 7131 connected with X.X.X.X port 5131
 ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0- 5.0 sec  6.00 MBytes  10.1 Mbits/sec
[  3]  5.0-10.0 sec  6.00 MBytes  10.1 Mbits/sec
[  3]  0.0-10.0 sec  12.0 MBytes  10.0 Mbits/sec

A second test using www.speedtest.com, also show a max transfer of 8mb/s up and 10.1 down, so its safe to assume we are being capped at 10mb/s. Now though I would like to find out if that is a ISP cap, or there is a 10Mb physical link somewhere…