Gadgetory

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 you make a different video than we were planning on doing today so while I was going to review the rog swift PG 279 Q instead I am taking yet another shocked yes my friends yet another shot at building my own pfSense router this time with a chassis that a isn't 1u because that was way more of a nightmare than it was worth and B actually is the correct width for a server rack is apparently a known design flaw with the 1u 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 heatsink 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 or blown it up we're starting again from scratch hurry up the mastercase 5 from Coolermaster lets you truly make your mid tower PC case your own with a variety of modular parts and accessories check out the link in the video description to learn more this computer is gonna go together just like that there will be no problems alright so let's do a rundown of the new hardware so for our chassis we went with an AI star us ad 200 LS II 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 2 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 and number three I wanted something that was able to mount our expansion cards rotated 90 degrees so that we could use full height expansion cards if we wanted to even in a 2-u 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 out right let me 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 ah I do these things to myself add ah yeah good on the subject of reliability we opted for server grade Hardware this time across the board so we've got a p9 ve / 4 L motherboard 4 masseuse the reason this one was chosen was we could have gone with an M ATX board quite easily but our chassis has room for an ATX this gives me the flexibility to do something else with the board in the future if I so desire and the main reason right there for Intel gigabit NICs built-in that'll give us a total with our 2 expansion cards so one of which is an i3 for TT 4 so that'll give us a total of eight gigabit rj45 ports then we actually have another card here though this is an i3 50 based SFP card so this is also a gigabit 4 part card but this one we're going to be using for the uplink from our modem essentially are like our fibre modem so that will give us a total of 12 ports using those 2 expansion slots at the back for our CPU we've gone with a low-power Xeon 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 PF sense so we're not going to have to worry about a bunch of writes on the disk either way for ram we're going to go grab some kingston ECC Ram off-the-shelf and throw that in alright so the machine is built it was a tight fit with that PCI Express ribbon cable and that bottom network card at 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 ok powers on it's a good side Hey now the monitors 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 Xeon CPU so do I have a badass router the answer is yes do you watch - tech tips for like just good enough the answer is maybe but either way we're going to 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 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 and 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 were going to finish the configuration wizard with that all happening garbage-can router this is Mel Begley of burning in here to you the smell like burning yeah everything seems to be working alright 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 this spot in the rack so 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 fifteen to twenty minutes okay okay this always makes me so nervous that is everything it'll probably take me 20 minutes so off my dish to this coffee don't put that camera on me it's making me nervous this is it here we go so I have informed everyone the network's going down let's uh let's boot up the pfSense box and hope for the best what the heck how did I end up with two keyboards plugged in okay it's working I think sometimes it's hard to be me okay do I sort of be lens right now no enter Oh an interface or a for auto detection here 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 so here it is guys our overkill router is finally working there were a number of issues it seems mostly related to our fiber media that were causing ports to not show that the link was up or show that it was what it wasn't when actually the setup process for this is as simple as 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 GUI so you can actually get in here and you can configure all kinds of different firewall stuff all kinds of different port forwarding you can actually set up some really cool features like when 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 so you can actually get cool little plugins that will do things like monitor which IP addresses are sucking up all the bandwidth just a great little piece of kit and I'm sorry it's taking us so long 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 gtx 970 graphics card in it it is still pretty darn impressive with Core i5 5200 you dual-core hyper threaded processor two slots for two and a half inch tribe's 1m2 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 applies a one entry per person 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 a drink of water we're good so thanks for watching guys if you like this video click that like button if you just liked it though click this like we can take it we can take the hate leave a comment if you have feelings that are more complicated than that if you did like the video get subscribed though maybe even consider supporting us providing a cool team oh I'm wearing as well well okay that one might not ever be available again it was limited anyway buying a cool shirt like the ones that we make changing amazon bookmark for fire affiliate code instructions for how to do that are up there or even just supporting us directly through our community forum I think that pretty much wraps it up I'll see you guys next time when I'm hopefully feeling a lot better