Thread Info
  • State Suggested Answer
  • +3 person also asked this people also asked this
  • Locked Locked
  • Replies 95 replies
  • Answers 5 answers
  • Subscribers 12 subscribers
  • Views 240425 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Options
Suggested
This discussion has been locked.
You can no longer post new replies to this discussion. If you have a question you can start a new discussion

Sophos on pcengines APU?

tomba_nzxt
Hi guys!

First of all - my big bow to all of you making it possible for home users to use sophos utm! There are many different things out there and among all of them - you remain streamlined, organized and offer a professional product at no cost for home users. KUDOS!

I have been using sophos for couple of years and i always had one tripping point: size of HW. I mean, there are mini itx solutions and thin itx standard, but it always turns out looking like a pc and not like a small nice firewall/router.

PcEngines has made a new board that is only 6" x 6", fits in their super small case, has 3 Giga lan ports and mini pci slots for wifi card. The box uses 6-12w under full load and is completely passive!

So - now the big question - will sophos run on this board?

Here is the board:

PC Engines apu1c product file

I hope this will/can work so that i can buid the fw that performs well and that my wife finds it acceptable to stay under the TV set [:)]

cheers

Tomba


This thread was automatically locked due to age.
Parents
  • +1

    It's been a while since this, but for people looking into having Sophos on a PCEngines APU board, I can tell you this really got MUCH easier with XG firewall.

    I just received my APU2C4 board with 4Gb of RAM and I must say I'm quite impressed. I have a 300Mb down 30Mb up WAN and this little thing really manages it great. In fact, if I download at full speed the CPU is at about 30%. I havent enabled anything but firewall (obviously) and web proxy (with antivirus) for now but I don't feel any lag whatsoever. I still have to do more testing though.

    To install XG in a new PCEngines APU2 board, just follow these steps:

    - Install SSD of your choice and burn the XG ISO in a CD

    - Connect the serial cable to your serial port

    - Connect to the serial console using Putty and choose 38400 as speed

    - Boot it up and run from the CD. Follow the instructions to install it, but basically this means you just have to press "y" once and it will install everything, really.

    If you wanted to do a blind installation (without serial) you could just hook up the USB CD reader, connect the power, wait about 1-2 minutes to give it time to ask for confirmation and then press "y". Wait another 5-10 minutes to allow it time to install.

    After the installation has finished you wont hear 5 beeps. Instead you will hear a music tune through the inbult speaker!! That's when you can remove the CD, disconnect the power from the APU and put it back on.

    Lastly, just connect your computer to port 1 and you will get an IP automatically (otherwise just put yourself at 172.16.16.17) and you can access https://172.16.16.16:4444 and start configuring it!

    Thanks Sophos for making XG a console-friendly install!!

  • 0 in reply to guillerone

    Is there any chance to install XG from a USB Stick? I've been trying this for some time and I can see the system coming up, asking me to press F10 to enter the boot menu (which I can get into) and than I can choose from four options. It doesn't matter though if I choose to boot from USB tick, the systems starts from the built-in msata hard disk.

    Thanks!

     

    Edit: I just tried the same procedure as before (all hardware was exactly the same) but I used the UTM image. Now it works. So it has to something with the XG image...

  • 0 in reply to TimBenkert

    XG on APU works fine, without any issue, you need to change terminal baud speed for installation, APU runs 115200 and i think XG at 38400...

  • 0 in reply to vikino

    Hi all,

    I've been using an APU for my UTM 9.x in the past, always had hard times with no serial console but I've read this is now solved, GREAT!
    Tough, I've now moved my UTM setup on a ESXi host and i'm not really looking backwards, snapshots, easy migration with fallback etc..

    Did you guys ever made some performances testings? i'd wonder how an APU compares to the lower SG HW appliances from Sophos.

    Cheers,
    Long life to UTM, tried XG for 10 mins and gave up.
    M.

Reply
  • 0 in reply to vikino

    Hi all,

    I've been using an APU for my UTM 9.x in the past, always had hard times with no serial console but I've read this is now solved, GREAT!
    Tough, I've now moved my UTM setup on a ESXi host and i'm not really looking backwards, snapshots, easy migration with fallback etc..

    Did you guys ever made some performances testings? i'd wonder how an APU compares to the lower SG HW appliances from Sophos.

    Cheers,
    Long life to UTM, tried XG for 10 mins and gave up.
    M.

Children
  • 0 in reply to Mokaz

    Hi Mokaz,

    i havent done precision testing, but

    APU 2C4 is little faster then 2D4, gives me higher througput.

    In compare to Sophos SG115 is APU much more faster. With same services enabled and same config SG115 gives me about 95Mbit from WAN to LAN routing and APU about 160Mbit, so almost twice more, boot time is also better on APU as in APU im using mSATA SSD drives.

    Btw. virtualized UTM on QNAP TVS-1282T3 with i7 CPU is much faster then SG210 :-))) And not talking about boot time which is on QNAP 5 times faster...

Unfiltered HTML