[Mashiro]

What do you use them for? And I'm interested to see how this room looks like, can you record a video please xd? Also I asked a friend if a Pi can run Pfsense or not and he said no cus the Pfsense needs two network NICs. What's that small and powerful board you're talking about? Do you mean like ODROID boards or what? About building another machine myself ... not sure but I don't like the idea, a server or a Pi might be better (I think?).

Sorry, I cannot record and upload a video of our server rooms. Only can do a sound recording to represent the level of noise and that it can make you very sick if you stay inside for too long.

It is a mid sized room with two big 19 inch rack cages and a half size 19 inch rack cage. Inside the half size rack there are patch panels and a lot of network switches. The patch panels have very thick and raw CAT 7 cables going to several rooms to provide network connections there for many computers. The big racks are full of the servers I mentioned and also with a few switches (including a few 10 GbE switches) and some routers. Both big racks also have 1 - 2 UPS. One UPS is a very heavy APC (APC Smart-UPS SRT 5000) that requires a very thick power input cable. The other rack has two rather normal Dell UPSs that we try to balance because they don't hold up as long as the APC does.

The servers are used for many things. File servers, print servers, AD & DC, hosting and etc. At the room that I mentioned above we have 6 Hyper-V hypervisors alone! In a different server room we have two ESX hypervisors, storage servers and a backup server that uses 6.5 TB tapes to backup data offline. The backup infrastructure runs purely on a 10 GbE network in its own VLAN.

Anyway.


I've not mentioned any powerful small board (you misunderstood something there). I was talking about small mainboards (mini ITX) that you can use to build yourself a very small but still powerful server.

If you get a Raspberry Pi 4 and buy a USB 3.0 network adapters you can actually do pfSense on it. Thanks to the USB 3.0 ports you can connect 1 GbE USB 3.0 network adapters to the RPi and have several wired network cards inside the board for pfSense. However the RPi is absolutely not suitable for VMs.

[rudra]

@AmirGT

no need for static ipv4 ip.

read here.
https://forums.he.net/index.php?topic=1994.0

why would you need border router ? I have those links so you could read and get ideas and cobble them together to create your own solution. not so you could follow everything step by step.

pi can work as a router. have you never tried setting up network sharing in Windows xp or 7 using NAT ? here you could have /48 ipv6 allocation from HE and could even assign every system in the local their own routable ipv6 and doing routing through the pi as a gateway without even using NAT. or assign reserved and do nat.

you could do just the same using a vm on your pc too. you don't need pfsense or openwrt or old router hardware running Sisco system.

I'm sorry i can not spend time and work out exact steps so i could make a tutorial with step by step command.

if i can do ipv6 he tunnel on an old Android set and route all local ipv6 traffic through it using iptables then anyone should be able to do. I'm mostly a dumb fool with poor memory and incoherent jumpy thought process and worst at expressing it all. if i can keep at it and figure it out then so can anybody.

[AmirGT]

I've not mentioned any powerful small board (you misunderstood something there). I was talking about small mainboards (mini ITX) that you can use to build yourself a very small but still powerful server.

If you get a Raspberry Pi 4 and buy a USB 3.0 network adapters you can actually do pfSense on it. Thanks to the USB 3.0 ports you can connect 1 GbE USB 3.0 network adapters to the RPi and have several wired network cards inside the board for pfSense. However the RPi is absolutely not suitable for VMs.

Do you mean USB 3.0 network adapter like this? Also I meant to use the Pi itself as a VM and if I messed up something, I just re-flash the OS again on the memory card and done I have a fresh system.

@AmirGT

no need for static ipv4 ip.

read here.
https://forums.he.net/index.php?topic=1994.0

why would you need border router ? I have those links so you could read and get ideas and cobble them together to create your own solution. not so you could follow everything step by step.

pi can work as a router. have you never tried setting up network sharing in Windows xp or 7 using NAT ? here you could have /48 ipv6 allocation from HE and could even assign every system in the local their own routable ipv6 and doing routing through the pi as a gateway without even using NAT. or assign reserved and do nat.

you could do just the same using a vm on your pc too. you don't need pfsense or openwrt or old router hardware running Sisco system.

I'm sorry i can not spend time and work out exact steps so i could make a tutorial with step by step command.

if i can do ipv6 he tunnel on an old Android set and route all local ipv6 traffic through it using iptables then anyone should be able to do. I'm mostly a dumb fool with poor memory and incoherent jumpy thought process and worst at expressing it all. if i can keep at it and figure it out then so can anybody.

Oh! I thought it's the same situation. Good then. No I never tried to setup network sharing. Also I'm currently using HE to have IPv6 on my PC but I wanted to have it on my whole network, I even now got my own /48 range and can do a Wireguard VPN with my own IPv6 so which is easier, routing my network through Wireguard VPN or follow the guides you mentioned before?

[Mashiro]

@AmirGT

Well, yes. You could use the one you linked to. I rather mean simply pure USB 3.0 network adapters like this one though: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MYTSN18/

The USB-C port at the Raspberry Pi 4 cannot be used for any dongles or similar. It is purely used to provide power to the Raspberry Pi. So you need a USB 3.0 device but not USB-C.

I would do a bit research though before buying such adapters because you need to be sure that the chips inside these are supported by the OS on the Raspberry Pi or else the adapter probably won't be even detected and won't work.


Well, the Raspberry Pi is still a physical machine. So no VM. However yes, you can easily reflash the µSD card with a fresh base image. That way you restore the small machine to a good state within a matter of minutes . I use Samsung µSD cards inside my Raspberry Pis and the write speed is basically insane compared to most other cards. Flashing a fresh copy of Raspbian Lite takes less than two minutes and the RPi is ready to go.

The RPi 4 together with a second network card in form of a USB 3.0 network adapter will work well as a small pfSense box for testing and such. I wouldn't use it in production though because depending on the amount of traffic and all the features that you wil use... the RPi will collapse because it lacks computing power.

[AmirGT]

@AmirGT

Well, yes. You could use the one you linked to. I rather mean simply pure USB 3.0 network adapters like this one though: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MYTSN18/

The USB-C port at the Raspberry Pi 4 cannot be used for any dongles or similar. It is purely used to provide power to the Raspberry Pi. So you need a USB 3.0 device but not USB-C.

I would do a bit research though before buying such adapters because you need to be sure that the chips inside these are supported by the OS on the Raspberry Pi or else the adapter probably won't be even detected and won't work.


Well, the Raspberry Pi is still a physical machine. So no VM. However yes, you can easily reflash the µSD card with a fresh base image. That way you restore the small machine to a good state within a matter of minutes . I use Samsung µSD cards inside my Raspberry Pis and the write speed is basically insane compared to most other cards. Flashing a fresh copy of Raspbian Lite takes less than two minutes and the RPi is ready to go.

The RPi 4 together with a second network card in form of a USB 3.0 network adapter will work well as a small pfSense box for testing and such. I wouldn't use it in production though because depending on the amount of traffic and all the features that you wil use... the RPi will collapse because it lacks computing power.

Well I don't have unlimited bandwidth, it's limited to 140GB and my internet speed is 30/2 so I think that it's not that high for a Pi (if I'm not mistaken) so I think it'll be good. Now let's say I got a Pi 4B with 1GB RAM and that USB 3.0 network adapter, what's the next step? Is there's even Pfsense version for Pi's?

[Kururin]

Can you mention any of them, please? I was searching on eBay cus I know if I didn't receive the product I'll receive my money back.

Here's some I found on eBay, and after googling around a bit, https://www.ebay.com/b/Dell-R710/11211/bn_7023272840
Dell R710 isn't bad as a starter hardware. And it's really cheap also

[AmirGT]

Here's some I found on eBay, and after googling around a bit, https://www.ebay.com/b/Dell-R710/11211/bn_7023272840
Dell R710 isn't bad as a starter hardware. And it's really cheap also

You must be joking, it costs $600 and $200 for shipping, no idea if there would be customs or not but still, also that's above my budget. And as I heard from @Hidden Refuge that servers make make much noise.

[chanalku91]

You must be joking, it costs $600 and $200 for shipping, no idea if there would be customs or not but still, also that's above my budget. And as I heard from @Hidden Refuge that servers make make much noise.

Too noisy? Just make your warehouse soundproof! And place your server there! So as not to disturb!

[Mashiro]

@AmirGT

Unfortunately there is no official PfSense for the Raspberry Pi. It also looks like the PfSense folks have zero interest and are absolutely not fond of the idea to build images for Raspberry Pis or other similar SBCs.

You will need x86 hardware to run PfSense. There are x86 SBCs but you still have to be careful because PfSense dropped support for Intel Atom CPUs HOWEVER most x86 SBCs that aren't too expensive all use Intel Atom CPUs.

[rudra]

jeesus !! this is the most weird solution i have ever seen people look into when a perfectly normal and cheap one exists already.

it is just using your vm as gateway. it will route for ipv6 traffic and direct all such through the HE tunnel.

what is so hard about it ?

why do you think you need pfsense ? ok. run pfsense on the vm then, as os and do the same.

but you certainly don't need any dedicated server system for home network. you are using 3rd gen i5. i suggest you better update that hardware and your will be amazed at what you can do even on a 4 core 8th gen i3 8100 bought 1 year used at inr 5000 , even with running two vm with tasks running on them.

or better yet... set up ryzen 2600 machine with an used system. awesome value for money. then play with as many as 9 / 10 vms. 3600 is even better...2700 too, but more power hungry and costly.

People set up full labs with multiple full fledged virtual routers and VM running on them and set up complex topologies to learn networking, using GNS3.

you can certainly use a vm in it that will keep running and routing your ipv6 traffic. you won't even notice.