awediohead
Occasional Visitor
I'm a noob to DIY networking and routers - beyond having installed Asuswrt-merlin in my RT-AC86U a few years ago, I haven't really been able to mess about and experiment with it because my S.O. is very reliant on a reliable internet connection for communication and study as she's housebound with a disability.
So my idea was to use an old ITX haswell era board to install pfSense or OPNsense on, just to learn and become a bit more familiar initially. Hopefully the eventual end result will be better internet and home network connection reliability, rather than less, but that might take a while! I love learning but my old brain doesn't work as well as it used to these days!
The board is an H87N-Wifi from Gigabyte with a 4670T (45W) cpu installed. It has two ethernet ports, one Intel and one Atheros GbE LAN chip, but I also have an Intel PCIe card with four gigabit ports on it.
I bought the PCIe card off eBay a couple of years ago having watched a few SpaceInvaderOne videos about pfSense on YT. Ed does excellent unRAID server tutorials. Just a few weeks after I got the card we had to move house so everything's been on hold since.
The new house is a disability adapted bungalow which has one coax and one telephone line socket in four of the rooms all of which are unused. I'm eventually planning on replacing these with two ethernet sockets so each of the four rooms has wired internet/home network connectivity with a second wired network exclusively for Audio over IP. My wife's an exceptionally talented musician and I'm trying to set things up to make doing recordings as quick and simple as possible.
So my questions are:
1) Should I only use the PCIe card and turn off the onboard NICs in BIOS or only turn off the Atheros port in BIOS so as to have 5 x Intel based ports? i.e. is the onboard Intel port/chip likely to mess things up or make things unnecessarily complicated? Or should I play around with having them all enabled?
2) I've read/seen videos where people are talking about having a dedicated port for management - hence the first question, combined with wanting to use what I have of course.
3) The board also has a wifi card - is this likely to be of any use or should I just turn it off or remove it? I'm imagining that when this hardware is (eventually) doing router duties then I'll be using my current RT-AC86U and RT-AC68U (currently master and node mesh) just as wireless AP's.
4) The CPU and the 16GB (2 x 8) of RAM currently installed are probably overkill for pfSense but does it actually make sense in terms of power efficiency to remove a stick of RAM? It'll only be running at JEDEC as I'm pretty sure there's no point running XMP profiles. I also probably have a 4th gen i3 CPU somewhere that would draw less power, but I've not yet checked whether it'll do AES-NI and I'm not clear on the difference in power consumption between a more power hungry CPU doing less and a lower power CPU being pushed hard?
Any pointers and advice gratefully received
So my idea was to use an old ITX haswell era board to install pfSense or OPNsense on, just to learn and become a bit more familiar initially. Hopefully the eventual end result will be better internet and home network connection reliability, rather than less, but that might take a while! I love learning but my old brain doesn't work as well as it used to these days!
The board is an H87N-Wifi from Gigabyte with a 4670T (45W) cpu installed. It has two ethernet ports, one Intel and one Atheros GbE LAN chip, but I also have an Intel PCIe card with four gigabit ports on it.
I bought the PCIe card off eBay a couple of years ago having watched a few SpaceInvaderOne videos about pfSense on YT. Ed does excellent unRAID server tutorials. Just a few weeks after I got the card we had to move house so everything's been on hold since.
The new house is a disability adapted bungalow which has one coax and one telephone line socket in four of the rooms all of which are unused. I'm eventually planning on replacing these with two ethernet sockets so each of the four rooms has wired internet/home network connectivity with a second wired network exclusively for Audio over IP. My wife's an exceptionally talented musician and I'm trying to set things up to make doing recordings as quick and simple as possible.
So my questions are:
1) Should I only use the PCIe card and turn off the onboard NICs in BIOS or only turn off the Atheros port in BIOS so as to have 5 x Intel based ports? i.e. is the onboard Intel port/chip likely to mess things up or make things unnecessarily complicated? Or should I play around with having them all enabled?
2) I've read/seen videos where people are talking about having a dedicated port for management - hence the first question, combined with wanting to use what I have of course.
3) The board also has a wifi card - is this likely to be of any use or should I just turn it off or remove it? I'm imagining that when this hardware is (eventually) doing router duties then I'll be using my current RT-AC86U and RT-AC68U (currently master and node mesh) just as wireless AP's.
4) The CPU and the 16GB (2 x 8) of RAM currently installed are probably overkill for pfSense but does it actually make sense in terms of power efficiency to remove a stick of RAM? It'll only be running at JEDEC as I'm pretty sure there's no point running XMP profiles. I also probably have a 4th gen i3 CPU somewhere that would draw less power, but I've not yet checked whether it'll do AES-NI and I'm not clear on the difference in power consumption between a more power hungry CPU doing less and a lower power CPU being pushed hard?
Any pointers and advice gratefully received

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