ALIX boards now available
The ALIX board, WRAP replacement from PC Engines, is now available. Netgate has them in stock, as does PC Engines. Both Netgate and PC Engines are long time supporters of the project.
If you’re in the US, Netgate will get it to you faster. I’ve ordered many WRAP boards from them, and just ordered some ALIX boards. Great folks at Netgate, highly recommended.
ALIX Board
Silver case
Red case
Black case
CF card
Power supply
If you’d like to add wireless:
Wireless card
Pigtail
Antenna – any of the RP-SMA antennas will work with the linked pigtail
The price for a complete setup without wireless is $185 USD, about $40 cheaper than a complete WRAP setup cost! This is a substantially more powerful setup than the WRAP.
November 17th, 2007 at 7:01 pm
I think it should be noticed that the PC Engines webshop is the webshop of the developer directly.
–>http://pcengines.ch/order.php
November 17th, 2007 at 8:54 pm
The order link for PC Engines is in the post as well. They are the manufacturer of the boards and ship worldwide. As I said, Netgate will be much faster for those in the US, PC Engines ships from Switzerland.
I welcome people to post additional sources here as a comment if there are others.
November 19th, 2007 at 8:40 am
I already own a new ALIX board and tested it with m0n0wall beta. works great. Trying to test pfsense next weekend and giving a report.
November 19th, 2007 at 9:17 am
I just received my 2 Alix2c3 boards; Pascal was very helpful during the order process and fast shipping to Italy! Downloading the latest embedded version now… And man, how small are these boards, amazing!
November 20th, 2007 at 5:21 am
Ordered one from netgate and it only took a couple days to get here… very good service for US customers. PFsense + Alix = the mythical router I’ve been searching for.
November 21st, 2007 at 12:28 pm
For those ordering the complete kit with case (From Netgate), is there a problem fitting the board in the case with the USB ports? I see the note indicates that there’s no cutout for the USB ports, but I’m curious if this keeps the board from fitting properly.
November 21st, 2007 at 12:59 pm
The USB ports are set back on the board a bit, there is no problem fitting them in the case without the cut out. Netgate offers the same case as PC Engines, so that’s also the case with PC Engines.
December 1st, 2007 at 9:44 am
Hi Guys, I’ve tried pfSense on a few ALIX boards, still hoping to get the lx AES security block working on it eventually.
As a throwback to good old working hardware, I just installed the latest beta on an intel L440GX server – adaptec SCSI, PIII, 512MB ECC RAM, 2 intel nics – works great on incredibly stable but aging hardware. All I had to do was disable ACPI in the hints file, and the file editor made that a cakewalk.
I thought the webGUI would perform a little faster on this machine with the full install and bulkier (albeit older) processor, so maybe that’s something I can help out with. I’m pretty good with PHP, caching and whatnot. We’ll see, I’m still using training wheels with FreeBSD et al.
December 2nd, 2007 at 7:05 pm
Oh yeah, I should also mention that pfSense worked fine for me on the ALIX boards I used – the ALIX.2C3.
December 23rd, 2007 at 12:05 pm
Has anyone had experience with some of the advanced features of PFsense on the Alix boards? I’m particularly interested in using traffic shaping, Snort add-on, and OpenVPN with asymmetric key encryption. I’ll probably be getting the 500Mhz board. Will 500Mhz/256MB RAM be enough?
If anyone would like to share their performance logs I’d be very interested to see those along with a short summary of your services.
January 19th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
Does “5004 MP Atheros 4G / CM9: 802.11a/b/g miniPCI Card” support WPA2-PSK AES or TKIP encryption?
http://www.netgate.com/product_info.php?cPath=26_34&products_id=126
Thanks
January 22nd, 2008 at 1:19 pm
Yes, the Atheros CM9 cards support WPA2-PSK.
February 24th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
[...] The final 1.2 release candidate, coming soon, will have support for VLANs on the vr(4) chipset. This is a common request since it’s the chipset used by ALIX boards. [...]
March 15th, 2008 at 1:33 am
I am just now looking at these small form factors as options, but one main question I have is – where is the information for NUMBER of users can these devices support for pfSense? Why isn’t there a place for such information? Can someone at least provide a baseline idea on number of users – by using Alix boards? Chris/Scott, please chime in as the experts. Thank you.
January 29th, 2010 at 7:54 am
Which is the best European reseller of Alix boards?
January 29th, 2010 at 1:38 pm
JM: applianceshop.eu is a big supporter of the project, I would recommend them.
http://www.applianceshop.eu/index.php/firewalls/opnsense.html
January 29th, 2010 at 1:41 pm
Pinoyboy: (responding to an old post for the sake of anyone just seeing it, this is the first I noticed the comment) We don’t put out things like “number of users” because that’s a meaningless stat. You may have 1 user who needs gigabit speeds, in which case you’re going to need something much bigger than an ALIX, or 2000 users that only need 1.5 Mbps, in which case an ALIX could suffice. The limits of hardware are in throughput (packets per second), and vary depending on what features you’re using. More info here:
http://www.pfsense.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=52&Itemid=49