 I like to think we take a very professional approach to our network infrastructure around here. Are you joking? Which is to say that I really hope that nobody in there or up there or around there really really needs internet because Jake and I are about to YOLO zero preparation, make and install a brand new router that should be able to help us take full advantage of a greater than 10 gigabit internet connection that we're going to be upgrading to down the road. What are we? I thought we were. No. Oh. We didn't have 10 gig before. You lied to everyone. Did I? Yeah. Well we had 10 gig. Well now we have 10 gig everywhere. Neat and we also have this sponsor. Privacy.com. Privacy.com lets you shop online with virtual credit cards that offer way more security and control than convention ones. Click the link in the description and get $5 to spend on your first purchase when you sign up. Are we just getting right into this? I think so because I don't know anything about it. I didn't even know that we were getting a new router until I walked down to logistics. I was like, oh, what's this box from Supermicro? And they were like, oh, that's the new router. And I'm sitting here going, well, hold on a second. Since when does Supermicro make routers? And then you were like, since like a long time actually. Our existing router is a Supermicro box. Yeah, actually I did know that. Yeah. This is basically the same box, just more strong. Okay, but do we even need a faster, more strong router? Questionable. But ours is like Skylake. It's like kind of old now. Holy crap, is it really? I know. It's old, man. Man, how much power does that thing draw? Probably a good amount. I mean, this one, I don't think is going to draw nothing either. We should benchmark it. What the hell? This thing has how many power supplies in it? I'm pretty sure these are 800 watt power supplies. Shut up. Yes, 800 watt max. 800 watt power supplies? What the hell are you planning to do with this thing? Go fast? Oh man, I'm so excited to kill everyone's internet shortly. We're not going to kill their internet, are we? Sorry, to kill everyone? No, their internet. Oh, to kill their internet. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, we got this. Our current router, which is... On the other side. Oh, where the hell is it? Yeah, that's right, it's mounted at the back. Oh God. Good luck. I might end up just selfie filming this on my phone, Brandon. Not going to lie, I don't think you're going to... Why is there a CPU pillow in there? I was sitting back there. From lttstore.com. It was not planted, I was actually sitting back there. Are you going to selfie cam it? Yeah, I'm going to selfie cam it. Jesus, alright, okay. Yo, what's up? We're going back into the depths of the server room. The cable management back here used to be better back when I did it. What do you mean? And then a lot worse when I did it. We actually used both sides of our rack, and the reason for that is that we used to have so much storage in the front, so many storage servers, that there wasn't enough room to have all of our switching in the front. So we moved all of it to the back. It's only patch panels in the front. So here's all of our switches, both POE and otherwise, for our fiber stations as well. Yeah, there we go. As well as our RJ45 stations. And then if we go a little bit, ah yes, right in the middle of all of it, hiding in there, we've got our super micro PF sense box. The power for this thing, I think, actually comes out the front. Oh no, it doesn't. Oh crap. I got to take the side off the cabinet. Bloody hell, nothing is ever easy. Ah yes, there it is. You can see it's really shallow compared even to our network switches. And that was by design because we knew we were going to have other things in the front of the rack, and they could interfere with it if it was really long. I just need to, oh my god. Seriously? We should move it, hey? It is way at the back. Where even? Would it be easier to go from the front? The power cable is at the very other end. I can't even point at it, let alone get my arm in there. I have an idea. You have an idea, you say? We could... We could climb the server rack. Yes. I like it. Good idea, Jake. Okay, well, he's doing it. I was going to say we could move one of the patch panels in the front and then just get at it from the front. No, I got this. He's got it. Oh, that's a pro... Oh my god, it's so hot in here. No, it does not have a redundant power supply. That one doesn't? It does not. So I will be cutting out internet. Do you think they need... For like a while. Internet? For a while. It'll take a couple minutes. A couple minutes? Do you think they need internet though? I think it's this one. So we're going to find out real quick styles here. I have no idea what I just unplugged. Everything here is still powered. That's not it, dude. What is going on here? What just happened? What did you just unplug? The lights are out. It's this one, whatever this one is. Oh, wait, what? What are you pulling on? Oh, I see it. I see it. Okay, it's out. Okay, where's my thing? Real quick. Oh my god, where's the thing? Where's the thing? I don't know. It's down there. Holy s***. I'm so sorry, entire company of people that are trying to work. This is the most expensive power test we've ever done. So we got our little power meter thing. We want to know how much more efficient the new one is. So we got to test the old one. It might not be more efficient. What? What do you mean it might not be more efficient? I thought that's the whole point. It's technically a higher TDP CPU. What are you talking? Well, why do we even need it then? Well, because why not? It's got 25 gigs. So if we did upgrade down the road. Oh, that's pretty sick. And our old one is so old. It's like five years old now. Okay. How do we turn it on now? Did you actually break it? I don't know. It's not turning on. Here, plug it back into normal power for a second. Let's just take a gander. Okay. Hold on here. This is so not. Why are we even doing this right now? Because I want to know the power consumption savings. Okay. Yeah, that works. So what's is this thing not working? It doesn't have a screen light up. Okay. Go get the basic one. Oh my god. Get the basic one. Beep beep boop boop. I'm so sorry, entire company. Run, Jake. Here, catch. Catch. Oh gosh. All right. Let's go back and start working on the new server for the time being. Then we can come back and check the power consumption after. This was supposed to be a very short side quest. Okay. I got the old server pulled up here. I think it's this one right here. Oh, nice. It might not be the exact one because this is silver, but it's the same spec. Xeon D 2146LT. Hey, look, look this up on Arc. One of the cool things about the Xeon D class processors that was one of the reasons that we ultimately went with a PF sense box rather than a purpose built router was that these Xeon D chips had this like encryption. Oh, right. I can't look it up. Oh my god. Why can't you look it up Linus? Well the site can't be reached. So it could be that Intel Arc is down. Yeah, that's the problem. What's the other options? Well, it could be that your wifi install is not working correctly. Anything else? Really bad luck? Yeah. Anyway, they have hardware accelerated encryption and what I had thought at the time was that this would allow for a very fast remote access when I'm off site to dump footage or do whatever else. But unfortunately, whether it's an open VPN software limitation or- It's probably an open VPN thing. Probably an open VPN thing. We were never really able to take advantage of that, but we do have a new solution to that which doesn't require this, which raises the question- Zero tier. Why exactly are we using a PF Sense box anymore anyway rather than a purpose built router? Because PF Sense is great. Actually what we should use, if we were going like crazy high speed, say we had a hundred gigabit internet, we might actually have to use a switch that has routing capabilities built in. Because when you get to that level of performance, like PF Sense, you can't even think about doing that speed. Right. The reason for that is that PF Sense uses a general purpose x86 CPU just like any other server from Supermicro would. In fact, there's no reason that we couldn't use this particular server as a virtualization server or as a storage server. It would just kind of suck in those roles. It's not really designed for it. Whereas a high end router from the likes of someone like a Cisco is actually using an ASIC that is specifically designed for network switching. The other thing is you can use a server that has no business being a router or a computer that has no business being a router with PF Sense. In fact, for our LAN party, we used a dual 32 core AMD Epic box to run PF Sense because that's what I had lying around. PF Sense is based on FreeBSD, which means that the hardware compatibility is actually excellent, both with modern components and even very old components. So turning your old computer into a file server and then your old, old, ancient computer into a PF Sense router is totally viable as long as power isn't super expensive where you're from. Did they completely pre-build this for us? Do we even have any work to do? Well, what is this RAM here? I feel like we should upgrade the RAM. I mean, we don't- What is this RAM here? Those are like some DDR1 looking- No, it's a 64 gig 3200. That's a nice stick of RAM right there. Oh, oh, I thought these were individual long RAM packages. No. So I just didn't even recognize it at all. That's a 64 gig dim right there, brother. We're working on it, Dan. Well, Jake unplugged the thing. Oh, I'm sorry. Thank you. You should have. I didn't unplug anything. What are we going to call this thing? New PF Sense? Sure. Yeah. New PF Sense. I'm going to call it PF Sense 2. We do have a small problem though. Before we can build it, I have to sign out this memory and they need internet. Is it working? Send them a photo. Oh, it's back up. Nice. 8 gigs 3200. I checked our current router presently has 32 gigs only. D2796NT. It's 120 watt TDP. Let's see. Did we get a lot more cores for that? Yeah, I think so. I think it's a 12 core. It's a 20 core. What is this right now? We're going from 8 to 20 cores. I also want to put an Optane SSD in here. What do you mean? There's a 660P in there already. Yeah, I want to go Optane. 512 gigs 660P. I want Optane. I would actually like to put two drives. Now this is interesting. If you take off the cooler, you can see this is one of Intel's BGA style Xeon CPUs. So these are not intended to be inserted into a socket. They're intended to be soldered directly to the motherboard for use in appliances that are not really intended to be upgraded like say for example, routers like this one. To be clear, the reason I asked for this. Yeah, because I still don't fully understand that. We were going to go maybe 20 gig and I was like, yeah, we're going to need a bigger router because the other one's only 10 gig. This guy has dual 25 gig on it, which is pretty cool. Obviously that's not the case anymore. Yeah, it was really expensive. So I kiboshed it. So we did upgrade. We went from 5.5 gig WAN to 10 gig full. So we actually get proper 10 gig now, which is nice to everything. I should explain. I wasn't lying. Okay. So we went from 5.5 gig to the internet in general. And then the additional four and a half gig, we did have a 10 gig link was to Vanix, the Vancouver internet exchange, which probably is where the bulk of our traffic is coming through anyway. You download anything on steam, you download a Windows update. I don't actually think steam is connected to Vanix. Oh, I'm pretty damn sure. There's not that many things connected to it. Like if you look at the Vancouver internet exchange, like total traffic, their total traffic peaks at like 80 gigabit. Let's look at who's connected through Vanix. It's small. We got Amazon. Amazon. No Google's through there. Just because they participate doesn't necessarily mean that all the traffic's going through. Cloudflare's there. I don't think it was actually that misleading to say that we had a 10 gig internet connection. Wow. That's a big chip. That's like LGA 1700. Well, BGA 1700. Yeah, I know. It's wild to me that it's just soldered directly to the board. It is FCBGA 2579. But the thing is I'm not even mad about it because this is not the kind of device that would ever get a CPU upgrade within the reasonable service life of it. You deploy this, you fricking forget about it. It fails, you rip it out, you put in another one. That's just how these customers work. Are you sure you don't want to put another drive in here? I would kind of like to do redundant drives. I'm kind of surprised there isn't two M.2s in here. I want to put Optane in it. I think there's a 118 right there. No, I don't want to use the 118. What do you need storage for in a router? Well, if we do like statistics or something. How much are you going to need? Look brother. 64 games is a lot of statistics. These have been sitting here for so long. The 64s have been sitting here for longer. No, I don't. They'll sit there some more. Oh my God. There's so many of the 64s. If I have to swap these down the road, I'm going to explode. Here. Yes, I will. Let's go look at what our current box is using. If it's like less than 30 gigs, we can use those. Okay, the drive on there right now is 26 gigs formatted. So a 64 is double. It's double. He wins. All right. Shout out Silverstone, by the way. If there's some random bullsh** and you need it, Silverstone probably makes it. So we've got redundant disks. We got redundant power supplies now. That's a big upgrade and we saw why that's so important. You never know when some rogue is going to sneak into your server room and unplug your shiz. I have no idea what I just unplugged. Yeah, you never know. You never know. The reason that I wanted to use these is actually because they're very, very unlikely to fail in this application compared to NAND Flash, which wears out quickly as you write to it and erase it and then rewrite to it. Optane is more DRAM like in that you can write to it many, many more times before you are likely to experience a failure. So yes, they're super low capacity. They're not great performance. These particular drives, I think only link at PCIe Gen 3 by 2, but we don't need the performance. I just want the resiliency to know that if we never upgrade this thing again, which we probably wouldn't need to, 20 cores and a router, this will still be running 10 years, 15 years from now. We've upgraded to quad channel memory. We've upgraded to dual drives, dual redundant drives. We have put on thermal grizzly thermal compound and we are ready to close it up. Now this is not a 25 gig fiber module. It should negotiate, no problem. This takes these 25 gig capable SFD plus ports and plug that in there and it converts them to whatever we want. So in our case, it's 10 gig RJ 45, but we could also go to fiber, add up to 25 gig if we wanted to run to, well, somewhere with fiber. We could do 50. We could do 225. Oh, and just trunk them? Yeah. Yeah, but how would you get it out of there? Yeah. We could remove one of our redundant drives and then put a really fast network card in here. Put a 100 gig NIC in there. I said ZFS to Amir and selected both of the disks and it's installing now. Why don't these need an update? I bet there's something new. Well that's for our later Jake to figure out. Yeah. Screw that guy. I'm going to go check the power consumption of our current box. Oh man, we're so close. So close to nice power consumption. Man, we're going to save like nothing. It's only 68 Watts. Two 10 gig, two 25 gig. Wow. That's awesome. Yeah. I think our current one is two 10 SFPs and then four 10 RJ 45s. Thankfully there's not really much of a benefit to that unless we had multiple WAN connections because realistically you would just set up your switch with VLANs if you wanted to have separate isolated networks behind your router. Which we do. But hey, it's there. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Hey. Right. The default is going to be a weird IP. Do you have a, wow, look, we're in the right spot right now. This thing is kids today, right? They don't finish sentences. Correct. Oh my God. It's micro USB. Jesus Christ. We have a two and a half gig one. Yeah. Isn't that cool? Oh, whoa. It's just a module. Oh, but it's thick. Well, yeah. Wow. That is cute. Oh, what took you so long, Jake? Jeez. Some of us just find patch cables so much faster than other people. It's in. Very nice. We could configure all of this from scratch, but that would be really stupid because A, it would take a long time and B, the odds of making a mistake when you're configuring your router, especially when you have a setup that says complex as ours is very high. And I'm not saying that our setup is like, it's too complex, but it's complex enough that you can make a mistake. There are a few things that we're going to have to change even once we restore from our old configuration, and that's the identity of our network interface. It's because they're going to have names like IXE0. No. Yeah, they'll be like IXL1. They might even line up, honestly. The only thing that won't line up is probably the 25 gig, but I'm just going to... They'll line up like enough. It's fine. Interface mismatch detected. Please resolve the mismatch. Oh, that's so cool. Just as part of the import process? Yeah. Wow. Is our 25 gig one not showing? I mean, we could just use 10 gig for now. What do we care? Let's just use the 10 gig ports. They're fiber. We need to media convert. I do have a way we could do this though. What we can do, very smart hack, is we can take our SFP module, put it in one of the switches that has an SFP port in its own VLAN, like an untagged VLAN, and then you just put it back into here, RJ45, and it just passes the traffic over it. It's not stupid. They do it actually all the time. Okay, something we didn't quite explain properly before. The reason this matters is that our incoming internet connection is fiber. We wouldn't even be using an RJ45 converter. We would be going straight into these ports. PF Sense, at least in its current iteration, doesn't appear to have drivers for it. This is our WAN. This is our LAN. We'll have to patch the SFP through the switch, like I said before, but I already set up the VLAN. Theoretically, we just plop this in and we're good to go? All the VLANs are broken, but those are for non-essential stuff. I can fix that later. Yeah, I couldn't help noticing that it's not super accessible. Yeah, some idiot put it not at the top. I didn't have a choice. Okay, but to be fair, this one's not on rail, so. It's not? No. We could pull it out, move these two down, put it at the top. There it goes. Oh, you did it. I pressed the power button. Okay, well here, so let's, we have to be very, oh god damn it. And now it's unplugged. Well, good. Cool. So, that's done. Hope you didn't need internet. I'm gonna do this very carefully, because if this gets damaged, then we're kahoop. So the VLAN is set in that port. Cool, it lit up, it's compatible. That's a very good sign. All right, I moved our fiber, which was plugged in here on our old router, over to this switch, and these two ports are configured as an untagged VLAN. So it's just gonna act as basically a media converter to convert this fiber into an RJ-45 that we can plug into the new router. Okay, so this boy needs to come out now. Just comes out. And then I'm thinking we move these down and put it at the top. No, I don't feel like doing anything. No, we should, because this is just loose, and then this one just needs to be unbolted and it'll just fall. Oh my god, I feel like we're asking for trouble. Trust me, it's worth it, it's worth it. Oh god, be careful with the fiber, eh? Yeah, let's actually just... It's fine, just... We break that, we have no internet. Actually, I can totally just patch it, it's fine. Okay. Holy s***, it's out. That's been in that spot for like five years. Cool. Four years. The warm boy. Okay. Really? You really wanna move these down? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Oh my god, they're live right now. I'm never gonna... No, they're not, they don't have internet. Well, yeah, but I mean, they're like on. Yeah, but that's just the Wi-Fi one. Oh boy, there's two sitting on top of this. Well, yeah, it's pretty saggy. I got my hand in there now. Okay. Sorry, Brandon. Yeah. I hope you weren't trying to film or anything. Ow, ow, ow, ow. Okay, just go, just go, just keep going. I'm going, I'm going, I'm going. It only kind of hurts. Ah. That was actually not that bad. Oh, thank god. Now the PF-Sense can just go on top. Oh, I'm so happy. So much better. I've been wanting to do this for like literally six years. You're doing great, Brandon, thanks. Oh, we gotta do the redundant power. Ah. Problem for later, Jake? Yeah, later Jake can deal with that. Okay. Screw that guy. Okay. Wow, this one's quite a lot deeper than the old one. Yeah, it's sick. Oh god. Oh my god, be careful. Don't hit the sprinkler. Well, I don't want to. Yeah, what am I guiding again? Absolute chaos. From the back, you gotta make sure it doesn't run over any cables. Yeah, but- Like the fiber. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I see the fiber. The fiber's good. Just stick it in the hole. Yeah, I'm working on it. Hard and fast. It's stuck. Nah, keep going, you're fine. It's stuck. Nah, you're good, keep going. No, I'm pushing on it and it's not- Ah. What was that? Ah, it's just the fan. There we go. Wee! Wee! Okay, see the- Need a patch cable. Okay, let's go see if it's working. What are the odds? Wait, we haven't plugged in the management port yet. Well, that is providing our DHCP, so the management doesn't exactly work when the DHCP is off. I got to- I might just have to reboot that Ubiquiti switch again for Wi-Fi. Yeah. Well, here we go. No, I'm up. Holy crap. Gotta love PFsense, am I right? Just like that, Wikipedia Black Death Plague, right there, lttstore.com. Early reviews of the backpack are in and it's flipping awesome. Good quality bag. It finally happened. What happened? We did a network infrastructure thing that actually only had the scheduled amount of downtime. Well, except when you unplugged it to check the power. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, minor details, Jake, minor details. We took a config, imported it, and it just works. We're just ignoring all the VLANs. You're not going to do a victory lab? We're ignoring all the VLANs that aren't on right now. Well, that's later Jake's problem. Yeah, screw that guy. Oh, okay, so you're going to run fast.com and I'm going to run this one? Honestly, you can't take this stuff seriously because basically we're going to be limited by the speed of the host of the speed test, not by our own speed. They use multiple servers now. It's pretty fast, actually. Yeah. Okay, I'm running. Okay, I'm now running too. Yeah, it said we got to 5.6 gigabyte. Okay, and that's exactly what we're rated for to the internet at large then, isn't it? Yeah, well theoretically they told me it has been upgraded now, but I can't seem to get anything faster than 5.5 gig. I think there's a little tweaking that needs to be done. Well, so we got up to 5.6 gigabit. Yeah. How's our CPU usage, RAM usage? 0% CPU, 4% RAM. We're using 700 megs of storage. Did we just build the most overkill router? Of course. Well, they're kind of hot actually, 56 degrees. It's been a few days and we've had the opportunity to do a bit more research into the issues we were having with our Intel 25 gigabit NIC in PFSense. It turns out that while the NIC in question and Intel E823C wasn't released yesterday, drivers for it were only added to FreeBSD, the operating system that PFSense is based on back in March of this year. Linux has had support since early 2020. Unfortunately, the current release of PFSense, that's version 2.6, and the upcoming 2.7 are still running FreeBSD 12.3, which does not include the new drivers. That left us with a couple of options. Either we continue using a network switch to convert the incoming SFP fiber signal into an RJ45 ethernet connection that PFSense actually has drivers for, we install compatible NIC, like a Mellanox ConnectX series, or we find a different operating system. This is where OpenSense came into play. It's a fork of PFSense that's also based on FreeBSD, but the open source team at OpenSense is typically a lot faster when it comes to updates, meaning the latest version of it does include drivers for our 25 gig NIC. Woo! Now, the process of converting over was fairly easy since many of the configuration options and a lot of the user interface is very familiar. I mean, it is a fork after all. We went ahead and reinstalled the old router running PFSense in the meantime, and then manually copied over the configuration. The hardest part would have been manually copying our 100 plus static DHCP reservations, but I found a cool script on GitHub that can automatically convert from PFSense to OpenSense or even the other way around. Performance was, as you'd expect, basically the same, but it does have a few aces up its sleeve compared to PFSense, including faster updates like I mentioned before, an arguably more user-friendly interface, and there's a lot more available plugins for adding in additional functionality. Now, it's not to say that PFSense is bad. We've been using it for years with pretty much no issues, and there's still a larger community behind it. So if you need support or tutorials, you may be better off sticking with PFSense. But in the last few weeks since we've switched to OpenSense, it's been nothing but great, so I wouldn't hesitate to check it out if you're looking to build your own router or you're currently on PFSense and you want to try something else. Just like you should try this segue to our sponsor. Don't worry, you don't have a choice. This is the segue. Nord Security. If you keep up with the tech news, you know that hackers are always looking for new ways to compromise everything from tech giant servers to grandma's computer. Thankfully, Nord Security's protection package is there to help protect your files, devices, and personal data online. Like NordPass, a password manager that helps you generate unique passwords across your devices and browsers, or Nord Locker, a powerful file encryption and sharing service that's a great alternative to Google Drive. Cybercrime is everywhere these days, so make sure you're taking precautions when you surf the web. Right now, you can get one month for free on all of Nord products when you go to nordsecurity.com slash linus. That's 30 days for you to see all the ways that Nord can help protect you online risk free. So what are you waiting for? Head to nordsecurity.com slash linus or click the link in the description below. If you guys enjoyed the- oh, okay, sure. Yes. Oh my god, that's so flaccid. Oh, come on. Okay. Come on, you didn't even participate. That was perfectly good. Come on. I don't want it to hurt. Come on. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out- Center, look at the elbow, okay? There you go. Maybe check out the first time I did a PF Sense build. I managed to kill, I think, three motherboards. Was that the first one, the second one, the third, fourth, or fifth? Yeah, I don't know. It was the one where I kept tightening the thing, and it turns out it wasn't quite compatible with the bracket thing, and so it would over-tighten and break the traces in the board. It was bad. He knows how to use computers. I mostly do.