Re: A FreeBSD-based Router

Hello,

> There are ARM based SBCs (smaller than a mini PC) purposely built
> as routers ie. with multiple ethernet ports. Since FreeBSD can run
> on ARM (in theory), I would look into those. Very low power :-)

There is a limited number of supported ARM boards. [1] provides a list
of them, but this page has not been updated in years so I am not too
sure about the status of it, maybe ask the arm mailing list if you are
interested in an ARM router?

If you are willing to take some additional energy usage for modularity
picking up old desktops such as optiplex's can provide you something
which can be upgraded very easily. SFF Optiplex's despite being small
(not as small as some of the arm options) can fit 1 or 2 network cards
in it, which can have up to 4-6 ports on a single card giving you more
than enough ports to make as many subnets as you like. Old desktops
tend to be cheap on ebay too, along with order gigabit network cards,
and the more beefy cpu gives you more than enough compute headroom for
anything you can think of. It does come at a power cost though, which
in the long run could be experience.

You could also look at protectli [2] which provide minipc sized
routers, however these come at a big cost, and will only save a small
amount of energy using newer more efficient chips than old desktops,
but they do pack a punch. I am not sure how well they support FreeBSD
however.

At the end of the day, you need to decide on how much performance you
need. If you only need a few hundred mbps of throughput then a
raspberry pi 4 with a usb NIC can provide you that performance for a
very low power draw, and reasonable cost. If you want something
performance which can do gigabit (or more in the future) then old
desktops or protectli boards might be the better way to go.

Take care,
-- 
Polarian
GPG signature: 0770E5312238C760
Jabber/XMPP: polarian@icebound.dev

[1] https://www.freebsd.org/platforms/arm/
[2] https://eu.protectli.com/