best soho utm? Prefer free or cheap. Pfsense, astaro/sophos, untangle?

[holden j caufield]

and what cheap old hardware have you installed it on? Or possibly on a vm?

 

[Emulex]

sophos
clearos
untangle

All work well on esxi.

Buy a nice server and store it in the basement - I suggest the $399 ebay DL180 G6 (14 LFF) with dual L5639 and 8gb of ram (rails included!) shipped.

Add 14 4TB RE4 SAS Drives and ?? PROFIT !!

nice thing is the dual 460 watt power supply can handle the drives, with two cpu's you are talking about 220 watts idle to 330 watts 100% maxxed out.

YOU should ASK for the 12LFF version (same price) because it has 2 x8 pci-express cards plus the x16 card.

(x16 to raid, x8 to 10gbe nic's

 

[holden j caufield]

that's a bit over my budget. I have some laptops laying around. I may put esxi on it passthrough a 2nd nic. Though I think I'd like a physical firewall in between my modem and my esxi host. The requirements for a pfsense or sophos are pretty low and I have plenty of old laptops with those specs laying around.

 

[ch33zw1z]

You'll need at least two NIC's on the laptops. got any USB to Ethernet NIC's that are supported?

 

[holden j caufield]

yes almost all therealtek rt8111 chips have embedded drivers. I also have the docking stations which have the gig lan on them.

 

[yinan]

I am running Sophos at home, and I love it. Free, and unlimited interfaces. Most firewall VM appliances limit you to 2.