[Guide] What equipment to buy for Sonic 10 Gigabits Fiber

[badbread]

Just reporting my setup here for any of the PFSense/OPNSense folks.

Running PFSense on an old Lenovo M920s SFF desktop with an Intel X540 NIC, Intel i8700 CPU and 16GB RAM.

Full line speeds (8Gbps) with no jitter at load (PFBlocker enabled), 4-6Gbps with Suricata running, 1-2Gbps using OpenVPN client.

Using about 23W on average.

[sommerfeld]

I have an anti-recommendation: I had a heck of a time trying to get several different Intel X710 10G NICs to play well with the ONT.

Two different systems with X710's on the motherboard (one with 10GbaseT port, another with an SFP+ port with a 10GbaseT SFP+ device in it) experienced very high packet loss and link flapping with the Adtran ONT installed by Sonic.

I now have something else that works for me but it's more complicated than I'd like so I'm not going to recommend it to others.

[dancingsnails]

I've been using a route10 with sonic. I don't have any NICs > 2.5gb hooked up to it (other than an uplink from a switch). I haven't noticed any congestion though. I configure it through a locally hosted controller running in a docker container running on a linux box. So far I've been happy with it although I've needed to do some configuring using the openwrt cli as the router firmware and controller aren't quite baked yet (although they're getting there).