this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
19 points (91.3% liked)

Selfhosted

39262 readers
187 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm thinking about building a box for pfsense. Looking at hardware options and I see a pretty significant difference in price when comparing hardware with and without AES-NI. I don't necessarily think I'll need AES. The way I understand it, AES is for using VPN that is somehow running on the router??? I mean, my wife and I both use VPNs on our work computers so we can reach our work networks, but that isn't using any encryption features on my router, is it?? Or am I not understanding?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

I'm not sure what you're shopping for with AES-NI but I can strongly recommend the HP T730 and T740 thin clients if you're trying to build a budget home firewall machine. Both support AES-NI (but obviously not Xeon QAT) and the t730 is cheap on eBay. Drop whatever NIC and an SSD in and you're off to the races with OPNSense. The T740 is performant enough to run OPNSense on Proxmox if that's your thing, you'll have plenty of spare processing time to do something else on the machine beyond routing/firewalling a 1-2Gb home connection.