okay through good times and bad times
through sickness and in health something something we make videos every day and
sometimes when our teleprompter mysteriously goes missing we make a
different video than we were planning on doing today so while I was going to
review the Rog Swift pg279 Q instead I
am taking yet another shot yes my
friends yet another shot at building my own pfSense router this time with a
chassis that a isn't one you because that was way more of a nightmare than it
was worth and B actually is the correct
width for a server rack it is apparently a known design flaw with the oneu
chassis that we used before that if you put the lid on it which we used to
create like that cool ducting cooling system for the CPU heat sink it is well
known that it then does not fit in a rack which would raise the question
what is the point of a rack mount chassis that doesn't fit in a rack when
you close the top of it so after all that after all the dead boards we're
blowing it up we're starting again from scratch here we
go the master case 5 from Cooler Master lets you truly make your midtower PC
case your own with a variety of modular parts and accessories check out the link
in the video description to learn more the this computer is going to go
together just like that there will be no problems no
problems all right so let's do a rundown of the new hardware so for our chassis
we went with an iar USA D200
LS the reason I chose this is for a couple of reasons number one I think it
looks super cool with like these blue
things on the front number two we didn't need a ton of drive space because it's a
router so we didn't need anything with like you know front hot swap rails or
anything like that um and number three I
wanted something that was able to mount our expansion cards rotated 90° so that
we could use full height expansion cards if we wanted to even in a 2u chassis so
just like last time we've gone with a redundant power supply this time it's a
different size obviously to go with the chassis that we have so this is a 500
watt redundant power supply meaning that either of these two power supply units
could fail outright and we'd be able to slide it out keeping the system
operating and put a new replacement unit in this is pretty important for any kind
of mission critical machine something like a router where the entire company
literally shuts down if it's not working for you know 10 minutes and I mounted it
upside
down a I do these things to myself
Ed ah yeah
good on the subject of reliability we opted for Server grade Hardware this
time across the board so we've got a p9d
e4l motherboard from isus the reason
this one was chosen was we could have gone with an matx board quite easily but
our chassis has room for an ATX this gives me the flex ability to do
something else with the board in the future if I so desire and the main
reason right there four Intel gigabit
NYX built in that'll give us a total with our two expansion cards so one of
which is an i340 T4 so that'll give us a
total of 8 gabit RJ45 ports then we
actually have another card here so this is an i350 based SFP card so this is
also a gigabit four port card but this one we're going to be using for the link
from our modem essentially like our fiber modem so that'll give us a total
of 12 ports using those two expansion slots at the back for our CPU we've gone
with a low power Zeon it's a 1265
lv3 and then for our boot drive we are going to be using an old SSD that I had
lying around it beats a thumb drive but it won't matter anyway because I'm
looking at running the embedded version of pfSense so we're not going to have to
worry about a bunch of wres on the disc either way for RAM we're going to go
grab some Kingston ECC RAM off the shelf and throw that
in all right so the machine is built it
was a tight fit with that PCI Express
ribbon cable and that bottom network card that is it is still unclear to me
if all of this Biz in here is is definitely going to work but one way or
the other it is time to find out if this system
posts so come along with me for a little journey
okay power's on that's a good sign
hey oh the monitor's not on that won't help what is this monitor doing get in
there come on
baby yes okay so the machine is built the
machine is posted we're in the BIOS it's working now seems like a good time to
address the comment that I'm sure many of you have already left under the video
yes I know this is an Overkill machine I
get it it's way overpowered for a router the reality of it is the manufacturer
sent us this stuff the only piece that I provided was actually the low power Zeon
CPU so do I have a badass router the
answer is yes do you watch Linus Tech tips for like just good enough the
answer is maybe but either way we're going overkill on this one so now we're
going to get into how to actually install pfSense on your machine so you
head over to the pfSense website you download whichever is the appropriate
version for what you're doing so in this case we really could go with either the
embedded or the full install um with the full install being more heavy-handed on
our SSD especially if we enable things like logging for example then once you
go through the pretty straightforward setup process that we're going to show
kind of quick on screen here you are landed at a prompt that shows you the IP
through which your router can now be accessed on your local network from this
point on you pretty much never have a reason to look at the display output
from your router box ever again because everything will be managed through the
web UI all right so now that we've mostly
got things sorted out we've decided we're just going to go for gold we're
going to rip our Cisco router out we're going to put our pfSense router right
back in and we're going to finish the configuration wizard with that all
happening garbage can router does it smell vaguely of burning
in here to you H does it smell like burning yeah everything seems to be
working all
right I'm just throwing this up on the top for now and then once we've
determined that it functions then we'll put it then we'll
put it into uh this spot in the rack so
uh let's get some power run up here and then let's see if everyone is ready to
go so there will be a network outage oh
for hopefully about 15 to 20 minutes
okay okay this always makes me so nervous when inter server that is
everything it'll probably take me 20 minutes to walk to my desk with this
coffee don't put that camera on me it's making me
nervous here we go so I have informed
everyone the Network's going down
Let's uh let's boot up the PX tense box
and hope for the
best Y what the heck how did I end up
with two keyboards plugged in okay it's working now I
think sometimes it's hard to be
me okay do you want to set up V lens right now no enter aan interface or a
for auto detection here it goes no link up detected
let's try one of the other ones yeah but there's no link
up okay well I'm calling the
tech okay I think it's yeah it's number
two oh it's definitely not in my server
room so I have an mrv in my server room
would it help if I just sent you a picture of what I'm looking
at I'm at the main menu um
so here it is guys our Overkill router
is finally working there were a number
of issues it seems mostly related to our
uh fiber media that were causing ports
to not show that the link was up or show that it was when it wasn't when actually
the setup process for this is as simple as is you sit there at the console you
type in the interface that corresponds
to your internet connection the interface that corresponds to the switch
that goes out to the rest of your internal Network and you can tell everything else okay full auto I'm ready
to rock you put in an IP address which it just lists on the console you get
into here there's a wizard should be pretty much good to go we had some
issues don't worry too much about that basically the reason we're running
pfSense is we want a nice high performance router we want something
that has a Goole so you can actually get in here and you can configure all kinds of different
firewall stuff uh all kinds of different port forwarding uh you can actually set
up some really cool features like what I was using back at our old office when I
was trying to figure out who the heck was using up all the freaking bandwidth
cap uh so you can actually get cool little plugins that'll do things like
monitor um which IP addresses are sucking up all the bandwidth just a a a
great little piece of Kit and uh I'm sorry it's taken us so long to to get it
set up but that's in a nutshell why we went with pfSense for this box finally
finally finally managing to actually install
it so we've actually got a giveaway to announce for you guys no it's not a
router it's actually a little bit cooler this is the Zotac Magnus en
970 and while it unfortunately doesn't have a gtx970 graphics card in it it is
still pretty darn impressive with a core i5 5200u dual core hyperthreaded
processor two slots for 2 and 1/2 in tries one m.2 slot as well as up to 16
gigs of DDR3 L memory support now the graphics card that it is using is a GTX
960 and all of this is packed into a super tight little device so guys sign
up for the giveaway at the link in the video description and the full details
can be found there but the usual things apply so one entry per person it is a
worldwide giveaway with no restrictions and thanks to Zotac for sponsoring this
sweet giveaway make sure to let them know you're happy in the comments
below below below I need to drink of
water we're good so thanks for watching guys if you
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just supporting us directly through our community Forum I think that pretty much wraps it up I will see you guys next
time when I'm hopefully feeling a lot
better