 Custom built firewalls. There are so many options you can choose when custom building them the Options seem daunting now for a lot of home users. We've frequently recommended this for people go I don't want to have to deal with all this. I don't want to have to think about what hardware to choose I really push a lot of people towards these small little netgate boxes for a few hundred bucks You can get the full features of PF sense and a nice little compact design and for our business clients we use a These ones are some of the higher-end models directly from netgate because when it comes to our business clients and it comes to support They can buy support contracts directly from netgate on their hardware They can replace it with the same exact model pretty easily or occasionally They're setting up an HA and they want two identical models And it's easy to swap those out and we keep things on the shelf here for our local clients For what we have installed so if we ever have a catastrophe at a client I can just grab their backup file loaded on one of these and have it ready and quickly get our clients back up and running But custom build work when we're doing labs when people want to hire us by the way if you ever want to hire us It's Lawrence systems comm there's a button where you at the top a menu item where you can hire us if you're interested We do consulting services People sometimes want specific scenarios played out and we have some of our lab equipment for both those scenarios Or just one I want to have fun and do some learning and I do like playing with hardware It is a lot of fun, but then the question comes where do you get some of that? Well, honestly eBay. This is an older model Right here of a super micro one-use server I'm going to talk about and the reason I'm going to mention this is because I'm going to do a few videos Up and coming that will involve this and instead of me covering the details every time I'll say I have a video in linked to this video about the details of this particular box now going Intel One of the things about free BSD, which is what free NAS and PF sense to popular products I've covered on my channel quite a bit. They really favor the Intel network cards and the Intel based motherboards They're just less problem and if you're worried about things like spectrum health town and you're running native firewall on here Don't that's not really a security risk that affects firewalls that security risk does affect virtualization and you let someone Untrusted run applications that could potentially exploit that that would be a risk factor But for the most part going Intel means wonderful compatibility less headache and less troubleshooting Same thing with going there with the Intel cards. I have an Intel Nick card here and a Intel Nick card here. This one is the Intel X520 DA2 10 gig SFP card So good SFP card that will work in both free NAS and PF sense here It is well supported in the BSD world and right here is the Intel OHM 9 JY I'll leave links to these in case you didn't hear what I said This one works also great with PF sense and BSD which is a four-port Gig card and then this has four on board ports. So this little super micro. Let's look over it real quick Has an Intel cease 2758 specifically the board in here is an a1 sR. I 2758 f and I'll leave a link to this as well as you can read through specs on here But this is the basic Intel 20 watt system on a chip a core so reasonably low price It does currently have as configured right at this moment 16 gigs of RAM in it And a few status spots and the four network ports in the front FGA in the front the IPMI is older So I'm not going to dive into that. It's I believe it's all Java based I haven't played with it in a little while but I remember not liking it when I first started testing this box But you can hunt these down sometimes that Everywhere from recyclers if you're lucky enough to have one in your area or sometimes deals on eBay, etc And building with Intel means you're gonna have the least amount of compatibility problems because a lot of people always ask me So I want to build it myself But what do I need and honestly is even though this is a smaller 8-core doesn't score very high on CPU mark or anything like that? Processor this will have no problems routing at gigabit Even if you turn on things like IDS it shouldn't really have for the most part any issues routing at gigabit It does not take a super powerful computer to have Routing done and combine that with a good card like this one here It supports all the different traffic shaping features and such right on this card now. How did I get this in here? Let's go to the overhead and just kind of take a quick look at the board So if you look at it from the top here, you see we have a little riser card And once again, this is something that you can hunt down I'll leave a link below where you can get this on Amazon if you have one of these boards It happens to not have the riser card when we got this it didn't it was all of about a $12 purchase on eBay to get this We have just a couple hard drives in here one has untangle on it at the moment The other one has PF sense because we've been doing some testing this board runs untangle fine and Looking at the ports in the front like I said, we have our four network ports Serial console and these are labeled one two three four Or three two one zero actually because that way they line up with the ports that are available Snap the card in Just like that. So now we have the card in and those ports line up to the same names that they were given I actually I think when we load it untangle on this as we do a lot of lab experiments and things like that with hardware and Like I said, it's a lot of it is building it with the Intel hardware is the most trouble-free And someone's gonna point out that I built using some Chelsea O cards with some of my other systems and they work But for example, I've had some virtualization problems with those they don't seem to pass through the virtualization as well So as well the reasons I do recommend Intel and there's a plethora of this old hardware And it's great to get started by digging into systems actually relatively quiet because it passively cooled They still make newer models of this particular setup that you can get from super micro and they're nice They have a passively cool instead of being passively cool. I should say on the new ones I seen they have some plenums on there. How about something to consider? I just wanted to do this quick overview of this particular setup right here because like I said I'm gonna do some future videos on it and sometimes virtualization is fun It's great But I want to do things on actual hardware and test it out including testing out the different network cards as Working on some ideas for a 10 gig pf sense video because also as lightweight as the system is it actually has the routing capability Not necessarily intrusion detection capability, but routing at 10 gig with this card in there So it's pretty amazing. It doesn't take a ton of horsepower to do the routing on These type of systems, but I'll leave the part numbers on this I can't leave you any affiliate links, but I can't leave you a little Amazon link for the riser card But this question has come up a lot because it's been in the back of my rack there And it is a box that we have used to play out some different scenarios We've used it for some packet sniffing to bridge these across and do transparent bridging on I've done some testing with it I know not everyone has like I have three different neck gate boxes in stock But these are also so we can play out scenarios to clients go Hey, we're integrating this into our whole network and we want to set up the same thing with I reviewed some of the Unify switches that we keep in stock for the same reason They're just stuff we have in our lab and it's important to you know Build your lab out and be able to do these experiments and constantly do learning even though I've been in business for 17 years I've been working in tech now for 25 now that's the year 2020. I never stopped learning That's one of the keys to all this all that I take the accumulation of knowledge I've had playing with these over the years and I still apply that to come up with other experiments and learn how Some of the networking works because you know I still like to have those aha moments or try a new scenario that I haven't tried before and Build it out and see how it works and testing it out in different hardware I also had some plans to do some free NAS videos with this box that does have six data's this particular case Obviously is not going to be very friendly in terms of mounting hard drives So they'll probably just be sitting outside, but it's a good set up once again for doing something like free NAS I know you can use AMD a lot of people pointing this out that it works But there are small issues occasionally in hiccups you run into with the new Ryzen's because they're so new and I Encourage people who would like to or put the time in to start with us almost AMD systems because if you do work with the development teams that develop like the kernel developers and such and do file really Detailed bug reports that does help those kernel developers quash those bugs So we have greater compatibility and sometimes I may take the time to do that But for the most part if I just am focused on building out the lab servers going with these older Intel systems is Pretty good solid choice when you're picking out hardware So if you're looking for one of these if you type in the super micro and one you and you're looking at something That can do really fast routing because you happen to have gigabit internet at home This basic little setup will get the job done If you're a business, I don't recommend necessarily custom-building it if you rely on it critically Step up to these now one nice thing is if you build Your PF sense config in this and you start out all your learning on it And then you decide later to move to one of these the XML files will cross over from here into a Genuine neck eight device and vice versa if you started with some small neck eight device And you're like I happen to be have been given this wonderful server It will move back over to here as well So you can take and move that back and forth you can take the configs and change them The only thing to very much note is especially with these two particular top boxes and of course the 7100 They all have their own built-in switches So you do have to be careful on how you export some of the configs Because the switch config stuff has nowhere to land over here So you will you may run some compatibility problems And you will have to do some realignment as I may call it because of the network interface names are going to change from box to box If they're not using Intel You may have to do a realignment of which ones when land or any of the optional networks that you've created in addition to But happy experimenting I was encouraged as I know there's a lot of people that are Building out their home labs and I've helped them get started, which I think is amazing I like encouraging more and more people to get into technology and I just wanted to throw this out there about this particular box I don't tell you absolutely don't buy other cards, but if you want the most compatibility I'll leave links to these two cards They're relatively inexpensive that you can find them on eBay And they're gonna cause you the least amount of grief because if you're just getting started starting out with a bunch of Weird and compatible stuff will maybe help your learning experience. Maybe turn you off to it I'm not sure it depends just on what level determination you have But at least I'll warn you ahead of time that could be where some of the problems are as I get those messages a lot Or see people posting I bought this one-off card and it doesn't work And then you'll want you'll see why a lot of people say if you're a noob to this start out with Intel If you're willing to put some time in and learn a little bit more go ahead and go with some of the non-intel cards All right, thanks And thank you for making it to the end of the video if you like this video Please give it a thumbs up if you'd like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell I kind of you like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out If you'd like to hire us head over to Lawrence systems calm fill out our contact page and Let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on If you want to carry on the discussion head over to forums that Lawrence systems calm where we can carry on the discussion about this video other Videos or other tech topics in general even suggestions for new videos They're accepted right there on our forums, which are free Also, if you like to help the channel in other ways head over to our affiliate page We have a lot of great tech offers for you and once again, thanks for watching and see you next time