I end up saying this every time but have a look at opnsense before you
get too invested in pfsense - I'm convinced that people only end up
using pfsense because of it's visibility (it's the one general purpose
turnkey firewall/gateway/router distro that everyone knows of off the
I did do exactly that some time ago, of course (I do try to look at the wider picture, y'know...) Maybe with Netgate's increased commercialism the balance is actually swinging back to OPNSense or others (and there are others!) but as they share a common heritage and clearly watch each other constantly, it's not surprising they're so similar. I've been involved with similar projects before where yours is constantly leap-frogging with another, very-similar-but-you-pretend-it-isn't product.
You'd be ok I think for all the wrong reasons - your internet is slow
enough that even a RPi3 with a USB gigabit adaptor could shunt traffic
between it's two NICs fast enough (for now, hopefully you'll get higher
speed internet eventually!) that it won't bottleneck. My home internet
is currently managing just shy of 25MBps downstream and that's very
Slow... ? It's not always slow... I just seek consistency.
I get 60mbps over rural wifi at night. The issues with that only come during busy times - the usual perils of a mesh network, compounded by using consumer grade kit with no particular QoS or rate limiting. My provider has been fairly candid, saying their uplink barely reaches 50% of capacity at it's peak. Unfortunately, they don't seem interested (or able) to resolve the congestion within the mesh network itself. Somewhere twixt my little bungalow in the hills and that fat pipe to their uplink, things aren't coping well. When that happens, we're seeing <2mbps and a latency in the mid hundreds. That kind of thing makes working remotely via ssh a bit of a chore. (Yes, I know, Mosh exists for this reason, but I just can't shake ssh and frankly, don't see why I should)
I have provided all manner of traceroutes and a significant amount of periodic bandwidth and latency tests spread on the hour over weeks to them, proving my issue - but nothing seems to have been done, so it's time to put loyalty aside and explore newer alternatives. Fortunately they exist, and more economic.
I presently pay £28 pcm for wifi (which is a very fair price), but there are sims that are doing unlimited data for £20 pcm now with a rolling monthly contract (Smarty for one, but there are others). It's telling that my wifi provider has just started selling 4g products. (But even if my confidence with them wasn't dented, at £36 pcm, plus an extremely heavy £499 install fee, I think I can do that myself.)
It remains to be seen how much better 4g through Three is here (o2 is my Giffgaff provider, which is excellent here) but I think the Mikrotic LTE modem I've ordered should be several times better than a mobile phone. I got a freebie sim on Three a few weeks ago, and the highest throughput on my phone was around 8mpbs, compared with 14 on o2.
As usual I'm looking for super cheap options basically! RPi4 plus a
gigabit adaptor and a cheap-ass SSD would weigh in at under £100 and
that's a much easier sell to people than convincing them to let you put
in a full x86 box running pfsense and a new VLAN capable switch.
Y'know, aren't we overlooking the bleeding obvious here?
You and I are both Linux professionals. We know how to make any linux distro do load balancing, multi-wan, failover, stand on its head and sing Hallelujah. Why are we bothering with pre-baked solutions?
Why don't we just use an rpi4 (or any old computer we have lying around doing nothing) and do this stuff the old fashioned way? Or even, use that computer with a prebaked thing and skip the rpi? (Power consumption is a thing, but an oldish pc is what, 35 watts doing something trivial like this? probably cheaper over a couple of years than buying another rpi)
