Physical or Virtual? A Silent 4x 2.5GbE Proxmox VE pfSense and OPNsense Box

After few years of usage similar router on Celeron J1900, im switching to Dell mini-PC with old i7. No enough power for running few virtual machines working properly.

Since these are Chinese devices, does anyone checked whether they contain any backdoors etc? I need to trust these to be used as my main fw.

Those things are cheaper than ever :) N5105 bear bones box under 150€ I would get a reputable SSD localy.

If it feels cooler to touch it is dissipating less heat...

You look like Linus Torvalds nephew, Morris.

Hi I have been enjoying your videos. You mention a video that installing Proxmox and pfsense on the tiny 5105 router. I can’t seem to find it.
Thank you. I order one through AliExpress.

Why PiHole over PFBlocker?

Awesome videos, buddy i love all of them. Just to say, snapshots are not backups every snapshot will decrease performance, so we use them before changes/upgrades...etc after we know everything works and you can keep them for day / week then we delete them.

I am virtually running sophos xg on proxmox on a dell R310. What type of limits would I see in using it. I am thinking of adding newer nic's. Right now on my 300 mb cable I generally get 360 mb or better. I have ids running and fiber is potentially coming soon to my address

Man and I was stressing over going unraid or proxmox/ Truenas for a new board I bought then being like is 2.5 gig going to work since there both 2.5 gig glad this video tells me yes no prob but now I may not have enough 2.5 although this new board was more for doing data log for my fanless pfsense play with vms and serve video backups. And possibly Learn new stuff to get a job I could grow more in.

I would love a detailed guide for the network configuration in proxmox for a opnsence vm.

I virtualized pfsense on my 5950x on esxi, it auto starts on boot so no downtime! Setting up the VLANs was kinda pain but everything is set

Hi, Im new with the proxmox. Do you have and step by step procedure to install proxmox then install the pfsense?
Can I also access the promox gui thru the lan port of pfsense?

Thank you.

​ @ServeTheHome Can you please share how you set up the storage of the server for all the vm? thank you very much

I’m waiting to arrive n5105 and I want to install pfsense and Debian server. There is possible to install it all on only one HDD? Proxmox, pfsense and debian? Or I need more HDD? How did you install it? Do you have a tutorial? Thank you very much

We all know arrays start at 0, so that hard drive being AA000665 means that it was in fact...

Hi! Great video, BTW, very high quality content! Do you have any thoughts on power-failure safety of a bare-metal pfSense vs a virtualized one? UPS-es can only hold up as much and once the power goes off, you want your router to boot up again all the time and every time. With a physical router that's a none-issue. What about pfSense on a bare metal or OPNSense on Proxmox?

Tiny computers can be addicting, be careful. soon you may have 5 to 6 of the things; justifying your habit by the price/value of small size and power consumption. That said, I have a few. My latest has 6 ETH ports, the N5105 CPU (outperforms the j4125 by a good ways)., and DOES have 2 so-dimm slots. They exist! Shipping seems to be better now... but anything that crosses an ocean is a miracle of tech and you should be happy to get it at all.
Nice review and some good information, many thanks.

Patrick, have you come across any mini pc's that have SFP+ or dual 10gbe nics ? I'm looking to buy one for a VERY powerful firewall. Dream would be Xeon-D but the Higher end Atom's or i3's are good too.

Am I the only one who doesn't trust electronics from ali express at all? Concerned about whats inside, if it follows EU regulations, quality, etc etc..

Where can I learn about the use of management port (and how to actually use it in real life situation)? Also, can the lan port for Proxmox be a virtula connection to pfsense rather than using a physical port?

I am testing out a similar system based on the N5105 processor. Heat is a concern. At idle, the chassis is about 50C (122F) and the CPU core temp is 60C (140F). I am not sure how long these system will last running at these temperature continuously. If you are interested in buy these, I'd look for ones that have extensive fins to keep the system cool or go for ones with a fan.

I bought one of the 1Gbps variants off of Alibaba, and the SSD died about a year in, so definitely a valid concern to call out.

Very impressive video review,actually this model is our first generation which is stable but big.We have developped this router to the third generation,pocket size with 3*2.5Bge+ dual 10.0Gbe port

you can add one of those fans we put on a wood stove works with heat ? maybe would improve the cooling ?

There's also a version with, 2xUSB, 2xUSB3, 1xUSB-C (with 4kx60hz), HDMI2.0, DP1.4, TF-Card reader.

Ok i get new box with N6005 cpu and nice ... but that loud coil whine ... any help how to reduce coil whine on VRM in BIOS ? Thx

Maybe I'm just too inexperienced with Proxmox, or maybe I'm just too dim, but I don't see why one would want to use PCI passthrough for a pfsense or opnsense VM. I've done just fine with both ESXi and Hyper-V without passthrough, plus it allows for migration and HA. Is it for latency? Is there some hardware feature that just works way better with a physical NIC rather than a virtual NIC?

version we had has a cpu of 5205u is that good?

I saw on the pics it has it showed a sim card slot, can you confirm if that is actually there? I would love to get one of these as a pfsense box with a 4g sim for failover all in one neat bundle.

??? Did you actually pronounce ETH? ...

What do you think of the similar Celeron N5095 devices with the i225v3 ports? 15W TDP instead of 10W.

where to buy this box?

I am actually watching this vidéo in my bed!😅 Great guide! Thanks

My N6005 unit was also taking like a month to be shipped. So I contacted them and they said they couldn't get n6005 atm because of Shanghai lock down. They said they have n5105 in stock. So I changed my order and it shipped same day.

FYI- the reason pfsense/opnsense appear to consume all the ram you get it is because BSD doesn't have the qemu-guest-agent driver that reports memory usage back to the hypervisor like most Linux instances do. Proxmox just sees that the OS has reserved all that memory even though it may just be being used for caches or unused inside the instance. Trust what the pfsense ui tells you, not proxmox. It'll run fine on 2-4gb for most use cases

i just got mine the mail two SODIM Slots ,1090NP-12 VER 1.4
not sure if got fooled or got a new iteration my board is blue
and i dont see the intel chips you are talking about
can you help me understand :)

I got the 4*2.5G ports, Celeron N5105 and tried installing ESXi 7.0.3 but there was an error - No Network Adapters were detected... Is there any solution for this issue?

just found your channel, you have the exact approach to computer hardware I've been looking for. so, thanks!

I'm going to get an alarm clock that wakes me up with "Hey Guys, This is Patrick from STH". I guarantee I'll double my productivity. :)

Hey Patrick, I hope your see this comment. I'm currently stuck in a purchasing decision between getting a Topton device like this or just spending the extra money and getting a UDM Pro.

If you had to choose between the two, what would you do? I've never used pfsense before, but I have a little networking knowledge. I feel like I'm giving up a lot of performance by going with the UDMP.

I set up the firewall protecting my Proxmox VM cluster as a VM running on that cluster. I was having second thoughts about that decision because it seemed like I'd run into an issue where I wouldn't be able to manage the cluster remotely if something happened to it because the firewall was one of the VMs on that cluster. However, that decision was reaffirmed a few weeks back when something happened to the host the firewall was living on. I couldn't get into my cluster remotely, and I was like "oh no ... this eventual nightmare has finally come true". But then, about 5 minutes later the firewall came back up because Proxmox migrated it to another host for me. I was pretty impressed and I was happy with my decision to have made it a VM after that.

Bought a machine that looks physically similar to this a couple of years back with a Celeron J1900. It's a great little firewall for home which was very cheap uses hardly any power - but like you, I find the RAM and SSD a bit of a worry (they're branded "Kston"). My decision to put the LAN on interface 0 and the WAN on interface 3 will from now on keep me awake at night.

Speaking of no name storage from China: I would be really hesitant to put ANY software that originated in that part of the world, (or better yet, that I didn't install myself) into production as the firewall in charge of securing and gatekeeping my entire network... I'd also be equally as cautious about checking over any NV storage hardware imported from Asia - simply because I have personally ordered simple, basic, run-of-the-mill USB sticks on Ali, and when they arrived a couple of them were pre-loaded with what appeared to be legit rootkits - AKA free memberships for the whole family - welcome to the BotNet Club! 😅

"physical or virtual firewall[?]"

Physical. And well known brands. No Chinese crap. And I recommend enterprise grade stuff like Sophos. OPNsense is run a bunch of pervs. Pfsense is a toy as well.

Now do another video trying OpenWRT in that