djpenn3

CenturyLink fiber. Trial offer ended, so I'm at $160/month.

7 hours ago, nanobot said:

I need to get a pfSense router setup here, so that I can replace this damn piece of garbage router that my dad bought.

 

This thing is literally the worst router ever. If it loses (or thinks it lost) internet connection, it will redirect all HTTP requests to the router configuration page.

 

Please tell me pfSense doesn't do that.

 

Thanks,

EBrown

A picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes. Do a Google image search on "pfsense uptime." I think you'll have your answer. Other than reboots after updates, mine is never, ever down. If I didn't update it and there weren't any power outages, it'd be up for years.

I never claimed BSD was Linux - only that I used the Linux router. Totally separate project that pre-dated m0n0wall and pfSense, and is now defunct.

m0n0wall was started by the same people as pfSense, yes, and it's now officially closed. Chris Buechler is the main guy at pfSense, and a couple of other folks help with answering questions on the forum and writing and updating documentation. It was begun in order to provide a platform that was more feature-rich and would scale to server-class hardware.

I used, and still use, ssh for console access whenever possible. Telnet's not at all secure, and ssh has way more features. My office has a static IP, and I created rules in pfSense to let traffic through from that IP on ports 22 and 443...and others, if some special need warranted. I very seldom had anything come up that I couldn't manage through the pfSense web UI.

26 minutes ago, mudmanc4 said:

pfSense is to the point of replacing Cisco equipment in rather large production sites. As you should well know.

 

Before I started with it, I relied on whatever tomato or DD-wrt had going for it, not downplaying them, just required a bit more.

 

Now I use it in three production environments myself, I'm a bit concerned though to be honest, it does it's job so well, I've come to rely on it. Top notch stuff!

 

Been running the nightly since 2.3 was at night lol

I used the Linux router, way back in '99 or so. Compiled onto a floppy and booted from that in read-only mode. It was a bit fussy about NICs and had no admin UI, but it worked. m0n0wall was good, but pfSense is truly gold-standard open source software, right up there with the best Linux distros, MySQL, the various Apache server products. I used to have a side business setting up and administering firewalls, routers, IPSec VPNs, captive portals, etc. for small businesses. Needless to say, pfSense was my go-to platform for most of that. I re-branded the web UI with my own logo and colors, so clients thought I was a real wizard.

33 minutes ago, mudmanc4 said:

We are happy to announce the release of pfSense® software version 2.3!

The most significant changes in this release are a rewrite of the webGUI utilizing Bootstrap, and the underlying system, including the base system and kernel, being converted entirely to FreeBSD pkg. The pkg conversion enables us to update pieces of the system individually going forward, rather than the monolithic updates of the past.  The webGUI rewrite brings a new responsive look and feel to pfSense requiring a minimum of resizing or scrolling on  a wide range of devices from desktop to mobile phones.

For the highlights, check out the Features and Highlights video. Past blog posts have covered some of the changes, such as the performance improvements from tryforward, and the webGUI update.

The full list of changes is on the 2.3 New Features and Changes page.

To get to a release, we’ve closed 760 total tickets.  While the majority of these were related to the Bootstrap conversion, 137 are fixed bugs impacting 2.2.6 and earlier releases.

Source

 

People, check it out, start a VM locally and have at it. Run the live version, just have a look at what this thing can do for you and your control over what comes in and what does not. Good stuff!

 

Been running pfSense since 1.something; ran m0n0wall before that. Just upgraded from (I think) 2.2.6. So far, so good. Web GUI is vastly improved, and scales well to my phone. Very nice work by Chris Buechler and crew. I encourage folks to try pfSense. It's a real-deal firewall/router that does everything you'll likely need it to do and a whole lot more. Excellent community support.

There ya Go !!! Hows that??

Very nice!

Welcome to the forum!

http://TestMy.net Version 14
Validation:: https://testmy.net/db/ReW1swYU
TiP Measurement Summary:: Min 197.12 Mbps | Middle Avg 722.07 Mbps | Max 774.33 Mbps | 33% Variance
TiP Data Points:: 197.12 Mbps, 441.51 Mbps, 557.18 Mbps, 656.5 Mbps, 758.77 Mbps, 758.77 Mbps, 754.97 Mbps, 754.97 Mbps, 758.77 Mbps, 758.77 Mbps, 754.97 Mbps, 758.77 Mbps, 762.6 Mbps, 762.6 Mbps, 751.22 Mbps, 740.17 Mbps, 774.33 Mbps, 770.38 Mbps, 356.12 Mbps
Client Stats:: https://testmy.net/quickstats/djpenn3 https://testmy.net/compID/19822805007
Test Time:: 2015-05-12 21:08:55 Local Time
Client Location:: Maple Grove, MN US https://testmy.net/city/maple_grove_mn
Target:: Dallas, TX US http://dallas.testmy.net
Client Host:: CenturyLink https://testmy.net/hoststats/centurylink
Compare:: Comparable to client avg, 2432% faster than host avg, 209% faster than city avg, 2328% faster than country avg, 3605% faster than world index
1MB Download in 0.01 Seconds - 1GB Download in ~10 Seconds - 10487X faster than 56K
This test of exactly 204800 kB took 2.858 seconds to complete
User Agent:: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:37.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/37.0 [!]

My, how far we've come since my days in High School. We used a 300 baud modem and a "dumb terminal" and daisy-wheel printers.

There are utilities, such as iperf, that you can use to check the network performance between two computers. You could use that to diagnose your WLAN speed from your laptop to your other machine. This would remove the unknown and unpredictable variations in your WAN connection speed. I use iperf extensively, but there are plenty of others available in Windows land.

I may not have a 1Gb connection, but I have a *dedicated 100Mb connection that I don't have to share with my neighbors and my ping is better. Almost spring!  /knock on wood

 

In other words, I'm kind of jelly. You getting that 10Gb service for $400/month?

 

*Not truly dedicated, but the ISP provisions bandwidth such that all customers can run at 100% at the same time without overloading the GPON port. My fiber is actually dedicated all the way back to the CO. They use a flat network design, 1 hop for me to get to Level 3.

If you're directing that question to me, I'm paying $105/month for the first year. I'm sure they'll jack it up some when the year's up; if they try to bend me over really hard, I'll go back to Comcast.

Uptime continues to be excellent.

Cheers!

I used to have Comcast's 105 Mbs service, which uses 4 bonded channels downstream and 2 bonded channels upstream. At least in the DOCSIS (cable internet physical transport layer) world, channel bonding is all handled transparently by the tuner in the modem. Think of it like a radio that can take the signal from multiple stations and mix them together. I would have to guess that DSL can be bonded in the same way. If you think about it, if the two DSL lines operated separately and you could only use one of them for a given down- or upload, you wouldn't really be gaining much in terms of percieved speed. It would increase the overall net speed of multiple connections, but that's about it.

I'm not an expert on bonded DSL, but if the traffic is between testmy.net and a single IP address then I would expect that it would work fine. Lots of folks with bonded DSL out there, and it should be totally transparent outside of your carrier's physical DSL infrastrucure. HTTP is HTTP, no matter what medium it's being tossed around on.

I'm paying US$105 per month, but that's for the first year. It remains to be seen how much they'll hike it after the year is up.

I'd also be thrilled to have something like an iperf server that us geeks could access. I would think doing a bi-directional iperf test would be just about as accurate as one could get - takes browser performance out of the picture. Thanks for looking into this, CA3LE.

This is on CenturyLink 1000Mb/s service. I live in a new building that's on CenturyLink's fiber network. They have a rack of modems and switches in the telecom closet, where they connect to the Cat6 cable that runs to the individual apartments. I run the Cat6 to a modem that's in bridge mode and passes all traffic directly to a pfSense firewall. The firewall runs on a Dell small form factor box with a dual-core 2.0GHz CPU and 2 GB of RAM and 3 gigabit ethernet NICs. I have a number of Dell Precision workstations, a home-build NAS server, an iPad, a networked A/V receiver, a couple "smart TVs," a Roku, and a couple of Andriod phones.

I'm really pleased with the uptime so far, and of course the speed. I can watch Youtube 2160p videos with ease.

On other speed test sites I've seen higher speeds, especially on the upload side and on off-hours when the load on the testing sites is lower.