 Okay. Through good times and bad times, through sickness and in health, something something, we make videos every day. And sometimes when our teleprompter mysteriously goes missing, we make a different video than we were planning on doing today. So while I was going to review the ROG Swift PG279Q, instead I am taking yet another shot. Yes, my friends, yet another shot at building my own PF Sense router. This time with a chassis that A, isn't 1U because that was way more of a nightmare than it was worth. And B, actually is the correct width for a server rack. It is apparently a known design flaw with the 1U chassis that we used before that if you put the lid on it, which we used to create like that cool ducting cooling system for the CPU heat sink, it is well known that it then does not fit in a rack, which would raise the question, what is the point of a rack mount chassis that doesn't fit in a rack when you close the top of it? So after all that, after all the dead boards, we're blowing it up. We're starting again from scratch. Here we go. The MasterCase 5 from Cooler Master lets you truly make your mid-tower PC case your own with a variety of modular parts and accessories. Check out the link in the video description to learn more. This computer is going to go together just like that. There will be no problems. All right, so let's do a rundown of the new hardware. So for our chassis, we went with an iStar USA D200 LSE. The reason I chose this is for a couple of reasons. Number one, I think it looks super cool with like these blue things on the front. Number two, we didn't need a ton of drive space because it's a router. So we didn't need anything with like, you know, front hot swap rails or anything like that. And number three, I wanted something that was able to mount our expansion cards rotated 90 degrees so that we could use full height expansion cards if we wanted to, even in a 2U chassis. So just like last time, we've gone with a redundant power supply. This time it's a different size, obviously, to go with the chassis that we have. So this is a 500 watt redundant power supply, meaning that either of these two power supply units could fail outright and we'd be able to slide it out, keeping the system operating and put a new replacement unit in. This is pretty important for any kind of mission critical machine, something like a router where the entire company literally shuts down if it's not working for, you know, 10 minutes. And I mounted it upside down. Oh, I do these things to myself, Ed. Ah, yeah. Good. On the subject of reliability, we opted for server grade hardware this time across the board. So we've got a P9DE slash 4L motherboard from ASUS. The reason this one was chosen was we could have gone with an MATX board quite easily, but our chassis has room for an ATX. This gives me the flexibility to do something else with the board in the future if I so desire. And the main reason right there, four Intel gigabit NICs built in. That'll give us a total with our two expansion cards, so one of which is an I340T4. So that'll give us a total of eight gigabit RJ45 ports. Then we actually have another card here. So this is an I350 based SFP card. So this is also a gigabit four port card, but this one we're going to be using for the uplink from our modem, essentially, our like our fiber modem. So that'll give us a total of 12 ports using those two expansion slots at the back. For our CPU, we've gone with a low power Xeon. It's a 1265LV3. And then for our boot drive, we're going to be using an old SSD that I had lying around. It beats a thumb drive, but it won't matter anyway because I'm looking at running the embedded version of PFSense. So we're not going to have to worry about a bunch of writes on the desk either way. For RAM, we're going to go grab some Kingston ECC RAM off the shelf and throw that in. All right, so the machine is built. It was a tight fit with that PCI Express ribbon cable and that bottom network card. It is still unclear to me if all of this biz in here is definitely going to work. But one way or the other, it is time to find out if this system posts. So come along with me for a little journey. Okay, it powers on. This is a good sign. Hey, the monitor is not on. That won't help. What is this monitor doing? Get in there. Come on, baby. Yes. Okay, so the machine is built. The machine is posted. We're in the BIOS. It's working. Now seems like a good time to address the comment that I'm sure many of you have already left under the video. Yes, I know. This is an overkill machine. I get it. It's way overpowered for a router. The reality of it is the manufacturer sent us this stuff. The only piece that I provided was actually the low power Xeon CPU. So do I have a badass router? The answer is yes. Do you watch Linus Tech Tips for like just good enough? The answer is maybe, but either way, we're going overkill on this one. So now we're going to get into how to actually install PFSense on your machine. So you head over to the PFSense website, you download whichever is the appropriate version for what you're doing. So in this case, we really could go with either the embedded or the full install, with the full install being more heavy handed on our SSD, especially if we enable things like logging, for example. Then once you go through the pretty straightforward setup process that we're going to show kind of quick on screen here, you are landed at a prompt that shows you the IP through which your router can now be accessed on your local network. And from this point on, you pretty much never have a reason to look at the display output from your router box ever again, because everything will be managed through the web UI. All right, so now that we've mostly got things sorted out, we've decided we're just going to go for gold. We're going to rip our Cisco router out. We're going to put our PFSense router right back in and we're going to finish the configuration wizard with that all happening. Garbage can router. Does it smell vaguely of burning in here to you? Does it smell like burning? Yeah, everything seems to be working. All right. I'm just throwing this up on the top for now. And then once we've determined that it functions, then we'll put it into this spot in the rack. So let's get some power run up here and then let's see if everyone is ready to go. So there will be a network outage for hopefully about 15 to 20 minutes. Okay. Okay. This always makes me so nervous. Wait, is that your internet ad server? That is everything. It'll probably take me 20 minutes to walk from my desk to this coffee. Don't put that camera on me. It's making me nervous. Here we go. So I have informed everyone the network's going down. Let's boot up the PFSense box and hope for the best. What the heck? How did I end up with two keyboards plugged in? Okay, it's working now I think. Sometimes it's hard to be me. Okay, do you want to set up B lens right now? No. Enter a WAN interface or A for auto detection. Here it goes. No linkup detected. Let's try one of the other ones. Yeah, but there's no linkup. Okay, well I'm calling the tech. Okay, I think it's yeah, it's number two. Oh, it's definitely not in my server room. So I have an MRV in my server room. Would it help if I just sent you a picture of what I'm looking at? I'm at the main menu. So here it is guys. Our overkill router is finally working. There were a number of issues. It seems mostly related to our fiber media that were causing ports to not show that the link was up or show that it was when it wasn't. When actually the setup process for this is as simple as you sit there at the console, you type in the interface that corresponds to your internet connection, the interface that corresponds to the switch that goes out to the rest of your internal network, and you can tell everything else. Okay, full auto, I'm ready to rock. You put in an IP address, which it just lists on the console, you get into here, there's a wizard, should be pretty much good to go. We had some issues. Don't worry too much about that. Basically, the reason we're running PF Sense is we want a nice high performance router. We want something that has a GUI so you can actually get in here and you can configure all kinds of different firewall stuff, all kinds of different port forwarding. You can actually set up some really cool features like what I was using back at our old office when I was trying to figure out who the heck was using up all the freaking bandwidth cap so you can actually get cool little plugins that'll do things like monitor which IP addresses are sucking up all the bandwidth. Just a great little piece of kit and I'm sorry it's taken us so long to get it set up, but that's in a nutshell why we went with PF Sense for this box. Finally, finally, finally managing to actually install it. So we've actually got a giveaway to announce for you guys. No, it's not a router. It's actually a little bit cooler. This is the ZOTAC Magnus EN970. And while it unfortunately doesn't have a GTX 970 graphics card in it, it is still pretty darn impressive with a Core i5-5200U dual core hyper-threaded processor, two slots for two and a half inch drives, one M.2 slot as well as up to 16 gigs of DDR3L memory support. Now the graphics card that it is using is a GTX 960 and all of this is packed into a super tight little device. So guys, sign up for the giveaway at the link in the video description and the full details can be found there, but the usual things apply. Guys, a one entry per person is a worldwide giveaway with no restrictions and thanks to ZOTAC for sponsoring this sweet giveaway. Make sure to let them know you're happy in the comments below. Below, below. I need a drink of water. We're good. So thanks for watching guys. If you liked this video, click that like button. If you disliked it though, click dislike. We can take it. We can take the hate. Leave a comment if you have feelings that are more complicated than that. If you did like the video, get subscribed though. Maybe even consider supporting us by buying a cool t- Oh, I'm wearing a- Well, okay. That one might not ever be available again. It was limited. Anyway, buying a cool shirt like the ones that we make, changing Amazon bookmark with our affiliate code, instructions for how to do that are up there, or even just supporting us directly through our community forum. I think that pretty much wraps it up. I will see you guys next time when I'm hopefully feeling a lot better.