- Joined
- May 28, 2011
- Messages
- 10,994
So in a different Off-Topic thread here many folks encouraged me to give Sophos a try over pfSense and I am very glad I did. It's been running for a while now and although it's a learning experience, overall it was an easy installation. Don't get me wrong, it's not Plug-n-Play (do you windoze people remember that terminology?), there is some configuration to do and to get the most out of this product you will need to do a lot of reading and testing to ensure you got this beast setup properly.
I'm taking this slowly, but I did setup all the cool features and had to make a few minor changes to some of the default values to make everything work. For instance Netflix doesn't like to run using the default setup, even when you have inserted many rules in an attempt to get things to work, so I changed the Web Protection mode from Transparent to Standard. It's of course better I believe to leave it in transparent overall but this was the quick fix vice turning off the web protection service.
My test rig is pulling 58 watts of power and I could save a lot of money buy taking this hardware and re-purposing it as my firewall.
The feature set is remarkable and worth looking into. I understand that it does run very well on ESXi although I have no intention of doing that. It would be nice to put both FreeNAS and the Sophos on the same machine, it would save me in energy costs but the idea of having FreeNAS on ESXi bugs me.
So I'd like to thank @pirateghost and @gpsguy for steering me to Sophos, it really is much better for a simple home user like myself.
As for hardware requirements, those are just as difficult to pin down as pfSense. A dual core 2GHz CPU (no particular model or brand), 2GB RAM, 40GB Hard Drive. BUT WAIT... depending on the feature set you want to use, you may want a better CPU and more RAM. I've been told that my E8500 CPU is overkill along with my 16GB of RAM but it sure does work speedy. I may remove half the RAM and underclock the CPU so I can unplug the CPU fan to see if I can go almost fanless. This would save a tiny mount of energy as well, assuming it works. I'll wait a week to ensure this software is fully operational (setup) before tweaking this kind of stuff.
-Mark
I'm taking this slowly, but I did setup all the cool features and had to make a few minor changes to some of the default values to make everything work. For instance Netflix doesn't like to run using the default setup, even when you have inserted many rules in an attempt to get things to work, so I changed the Web Protection mode from Transparent to Standard. It's of course better I believe to leave it in transparent overall but this was the quick fix vice turning off the web protection service.
My test rig is pulling 58 watts of power and I could save a lot of money buy taking this hardware and re-purposing it as my firewall.
The feature set is remarkable and worth looking into. I understand that it does run very well on ESXi although I have no intention of doing that. It would be nice to put both FreeNAS and the Sophos on the same machine, it would save me in energy costs but the idea of having FreeNAS on ESXi bugs me.
So I'd like to thank @pirateghost and @gpsguy for steering me to Sophos, it really is much better for a simple home user like myself.
As for hardware requirements, those are just as difficult to pin down as pfSense. A dual core 2GHz CPU (no particular model or brand), 2GB RAM, 40GB Hard Drive. BUT WAIT... depending on the feature set you want to use, you may want a better CPU and more RAM. I've been told that my E8500 CPU is overkill along with my 16GB of RAM but it sure does work speedy. I may remove half the RAM and underclock the CPU so I can unplug the CPU fan to see if I can go almost fanless. This would save a tiny mount of energy as well, assuming it works. I'll wait a week to ensure this software is fully operational (setup) before tweaking this kind of stuff.
-Mark