The velocloud OEM firmware was built upon (a heavily modified) OpenWrt 15.05.x, for which source (and apparently the required igb patches to teach it about the mdio connected Marvell switch) exists. For opnsense/ pfsense no drivers exist, they'd need to be written/ ported.
Obviously motivated developers might be able to get this working for either OpenWrt or opnsense/ pfsense, it's an open question who's going to 'win' there (or if there is anyone actively working on it at all) - but it's not trivial (nor would it to be getting the necessary changes merged into mainline igb) and may very well 'never' happen for either project. On the scale of things, this (at least for linux) should be easier than getting a new mips/ arm target ported from vendor sources (as the patches appear to be relatively clean, self contained), but it's still low-level netdev development (combined with quite some social work to convince Intel developers and linux netdev to accept the resulting patches into igb) and some unknowns waiting to happen.
Barracuda builds X86-based firewall appliances under the "CloudGen" label. So there's another search term to save in your favorite classifieds website.
As I hinted at above, I recently got my hand on a Barracuda F18, for a dance and a song*. Slightly disappointingly it turned out to be the Revision A model running an Intel C2358 CPU (the Revision B would run an Apollo Lake CPU). It contains 2 GB DDR3 RAM in one of the RAM slots and a 128 GB Intel S3110 SSD (which, for some reason, only reports 67 GB ... binned by Intel perhaps?).
I only have a rather poor setup to test its routing performance, but cursory tests indicate that it can saturate a gigabit line without breaking much of a sweat: iperf3 shows 940 mbit/s WAN<>LAN with one of the CPU cores at barely 20%.
Hardware-wise it is a step-up from other similar firewall appliances:
The build quality, both of the case and the board, is significantly better than for example the Lannertec OEM devices as used by R&S/GateProtect, although I couldn't find the actual manufacturer marked anywhere on the board.
The board has four gigabit ports, four USB2.0 ports. Internally there's two one MSATA and one Mini PCIE connector (on the top right) and PCI-E connectors (at the right edge), presumably for storage and a wireless card (the back side of the case has mounting holes for wifi antennae). The BIOS is EFI capable, but it doesn't allow any modifications -- even basic ones like a BIOS admin password -- so it is basically relegated to a status display. BIOS and console are exposed through the VGA connector and the RJ45 "console" RS232 port.
The only downside to the device is that, for whatever reason, it gobbles around 12W in idle. Which might not be a huge consideration in a SOHO environment -- which is where this very machine will spend its future OpenWrt life. But with current power prices 12W are a lot when running 24/7 at home. (As a point of comparison: my Celeron J1900-based R&S GateProtect GPO-150v2 idles at slightly more than 5W.)
Manufacturer/Model information is under the heat sink. MICRO-STAR Model MS-S1401. The one I have only has a 30GB Intel SSD. There are still 8 more of them available for $20 + shipping on ebay. Search Barracuda F18.
Ah, I suspected as much. Thank you for the info (unfortunately it doesn't really lead anywhere useful, like a manual or BIOS update).
I bought mine for €20 + shipping. But I didn't even need the firewall itself, I bought it for the rather nice 19" rack shelf with exposed/routed ethernet ports, the firewall itself was a bonus.
Of note: Unlike similar firewall appliances that run on regular random 12V supplies, the F18 revision A requires a 19V power supply.
... which might be a factor in the unusually high power draw: Even powered down in standby it draws some 5 to 6W. Without deeper knowledge, it looks like the board wastes a good amount on voltage conversion.
someone should remove the term "cheap" and replace it a with a PRICE in USD.
For me 220$ is cheap...probably not for you or for anyone in some countries. a fixed value will make rules clear for everyone.
By the way 220$ for a router with thoses specs...i don't think it's expensive, wherever you live...
it's an Intel Xeon D1527 4c/8t with 16GB and 2 SFP+ !
E3825 isn't a great performer: 2 cores and it looks like a(n even) slower version of the E3826 found in the Sophos SG105 Revs 1 and 2, and I found that one barely adequate for gigabit NAT with PPPoE leaving nothing left over for any other tasks.
You're right ! i though there was some turbo speed for this CPU...
in this case the NSG-E200 with a quad 2.4Ghz cpu should be way better, for 15$ extra. But OK 117$ is too expansive for this topic...
i added the necessary WAN DHCP options to get my internet working...but there is really no way to configure something from the GUI ?!
fortunately we can do it from the config files...
I just made a speedtest, i can't reach the 942Mbps i'm getting with my MT7622 A8000RU....i'm around 920Mbps with an average around 895Mbps. with 1 cpu at 100%
there is a shitload of python scripts runing in the background...
If one were a bit naughty (and after a good backup), it might be interesting to see how it behaves after rm -rf /opt and rm /usr/bin/python, to kill of all that cloud cruft (it might crash and burn in the process though). A less permanent approach would be gratuitously using /etc/init.d/… stop and then killing processes on the running system.
