Comments on: pfSense Intro Video from Wide Open Mind

By: Juergen Kerner

Juergen Kerner — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 09:53:56 +0000

Chris,
you know about my embedded affinities )

By: Matthew

Matthew — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:23:31 +0000

All parts used in the video were in fact obtained for free, and were what happened to be on hand.

Power consumption is an defiantly worth consideration (which I wanted to mention in the video, but it got left out). It is by no means a deal breaker though.

By: Chris Buechler

Chris Buechler — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:43:45 +0000

I presume by power consumption you mean it’s something that wasn’t considered or mentioned, and that’s true. But a PC of that era doesn’t pull a lot of power. Depending on your power rates, it probably costs $30-$100 USD/year to power a box of that spec. Whether it makes sense financially to pick up an ALIX or similar depends on your power costs. At the low end, the ALIX which would cost about $3 USD/year in power would take longer than its expected life to pay for itself. At the high end, it would pay for itself in less than 3 years, so it can definitely make financial sense to not run old PC hardware if your cost of electricity is high.

Those Cisco cards can be had dirt cheap on ebay. Though possibly still more than the PC, given most people can likely find a PC of that spec for free.

Looks like a Dell Optiplex model I used to work with quite a few years ago, either a Pentium MMX or PII. Not a blazing fast box, but you can push around 40 Mb through a Pentium 200 MMX with good NICs so it’s a serviceable spec for most residential deployments.

By: Juergen Kerner

Juergen Kerner — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:37:29 +0000

I’m always ver amused about such stories, ’cause power consumption is a point where is no light in this clip.
The other funny thing is the cisco wireless card which costs more than the worth of the whole pc )