Protectli pfsense11/1/2023 ![]() ![]() I set the fan's speed to its lowest setting-it's inaudible from more than a few inches away. I placed the fan on top of the Protecli box, with the airflow upwards to move the warm air away from the heat sink. For now, I have the other one just sitting on another shelf assuming I want to keep this setup, I'll either perform surgery on the USB cable or swap it for the single-fan version. ![]() Searching Amazon, I found this USB-powered cooling fan…or rather, dual cooling fans: I thought it was two separate fans (I only needed one), but it's two fans wired together. But I generally figure if something's running cooler, it should last longer, so I was curious as to what impact a small fan would have on the temperature figures-a big heat sink is great ( convection FTW!), but a fan the moves the hot air off the heat sink (thereby replacing it with cooler air) helps cool things even more effectively. (It lacked the multiple temperature sensors of this newer CPU.) The Celeron J3160 has a temperature design limit of 194F, so in theory, there's no danger of overheating. My old box-which had a dual-core Atom-ran much cooler, at around 100F overall. Not shown is the overall average temp, which was in the 120F to 125F range. ![]() After I got everything configured and running, the temp report in pfSense looked liked this: And yes, it's just a bit smaller and more elegant than my old box-the entire thing is roughly the size of my old box's external cooling fan.Īnd therein lies the point of this post: The Protectli is a fanless design, so cooling is all via the huge heat sink on top of the thing. That's a Protectli fanless Firewall Appliance with a quad-core Celeron J3160 CPU, 4GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage. (That way, I'll have a spare if the new one breaks…at least until that unsupported version of pfSense is released.) Here's the new box… However, it's aging and its CPU won't be supported in an upcoming pfSense release, so I decided to replace it. While it's not the world's loveliest box…ok, so it may be the world's ugliest box… I built a mini PC (a box roughly 9" per side) for pfSense, and it's been running smoothly for over five years 1 I'll be writing more about pfSense and my routing PCs in a future post. ![]() At home, our network routing and firewall is handled by an open-source software package called pfSense® it has a ton of features, and is relatively easy to configure. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |