Cheap & Capable pfSense/OpenWRT Machine! Fujitsu S920 Router Review

This $50 thin client from 2015 beats the $200 router that we built in the last video... by a big margin.

Fujitsu S920 paired with a PCIe NIC is a great cheap machine for OpenWRT, OPNSense, IPFire or VyOS!

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Aves – Day Trip

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[davidstech]

Aaand, prices have gone through the roof on the Fujitsus!

[SmokeytheBeer]

That's my favorite thing about discussing tech, someone probably already found an easier or better way to solve the problem.

[sebby]

I love that you made this follow up video listening to valuable feedback. I find your videos to be really well done, honest and informative.

[grinder]

1. With iperf you can do parallel streams (check the -P switch). You could probably maximise the 10Gb speed of that NIC that way.
2. Having said the above (and just to be clear for the wider audience) what iperf can achieve is very different to what you can get when you perform real life tasks such as (dynamic) routing, NATting, firewalling, IDS/IPS, antivirus, etc and generally FW/NGFW tasks.

[charleshines]

Also when it comes to the power supply, make sure to get the polarity right if you modify an existing one. That is pay attention to whether the center (or tip) is positive or negative. Obviously the other part of the connector will be whatever the tip was not. If you get the polarity wrong, there is a very good chance of damaging the computer and thus a very good chance it will never start again. When polarity is reversed there can even be a risk of smoke and fire. Other electrical problems cause fires too so be careful.

Thank you for making this video. This provided me with the exact answers I was looking for regarding the S920, particularly regarding power consumption. To prevent CPU bottlenecks during throughput tests, run iperf3 on different machines instead of the DUT. Remember that pps with 64 B packets is a more valuable metric than average bps and will provide you with more precise information on packet handling capabilities. Keep up the good work.

[notreflame]

This just what ive been looking for, cheap, low power, extendable, supports pfSense. Im gonna get 2 of these for failover and ditch my provider modem completly with a VigorNic 132.

[IlfStoyanov]

According to spec sheets, this CPU can support up to 8GB of ECC ram, too, which would make it a great homelab server. You can run web servers, mail servers, etc.

[BjornV]

Also to mention that in the S920 there are 3 cpu versions :
AMD G-Series GX415GA @1.5Ghz Quad Core cpu
AMD G-Series GX222GC @2.2Ghz Dual Core cpu
AMD G-Series GX424CC @2.4Ghz Quad Core cpu
But the GX222GC model doesn't like a Quad port, i have tested this model with a few different Quad port cards, and with all, the ThinClient reboots when you pull traffic through it, even when browsing through the Web GUI of Pfsense and it reboots. With a Dual port card this model works fine, even at full speed.
The GX415GA model like in this video works fine with Dual and Quad port cards, the GX424CC version i havn't tested yet, of this will except a Quad port card.
The malfunction of a Quad port card in the GX222GC has (i guess) to do that the PCI-E slot doesn't provide enough power for the more energy hungry Quad port cards.

[fakepixilord]

I use this thinclient for about 3 years as my pfsense box. Had 8gig of RAM lying around and put a quad port into it. Very happy with that thing.

[bits]

Thin clients are great, they've been completely missed by the wider community so they're really cheap and most of them have pretty good specs and are well suited for mostly idle and low usage tasks with very low power consumption even at peak

[Ozz]

Crazy, was just reaseraching the subject, saw the comment that started this video, searched for the device and it led me back here . Love it.

[AlicesReflexion]

The other influencer curse is when a product becomes 5x as expensive when you mention it in a video.

Glad that one isn't happening... Yet.

[mrsadrobot]

This is good advice, and cost saving too. I got two Fujitsu D3313-S2x boxes from e-waste and one of them has just become my pfsense router on 500mpbs fibre, works like a charm. The only thing I did was put in a small sata drive, 8GB RAM and replaced the heat sink compound.

[JAFOpty]

I got a TP link router for $20 at a garage sale, flashed it with OpenWRT... it has been working great for about 3 yrs.

[DeputatKaktus]

I recently got myself one of those S920 boxes to run Home Assistant. Works beautifully…and I might pull the trigger on another one of these for the project you introduced here.
Those thin clients are actually really really neat for a lot of things and with the Raspi Foundation apparently having abandoned the home user market and selling to “professional applications” exclusively as of December 2022, other platforms are pretty appealing. There a literally non Pis on sale anywhere at the moment, except the odd Compute Module maybe.

BTW, I got my Home Assistant box about two weeks ago (roughly mid-November 2022) and paid 35 bucks plus shipping. And the unit came with a PSU. So, still reasonably cheap b

I am still loving my collection of RPi boards but I am not paying 170+ of European currency for a medium range Pi 4. Sorry but that is just nuts.

[levieux]

It's indeed a good deal. Regarding the 10G, I was quite surprised you didn't fill the link, but your htop showed only 2 cores were used. You might have been facing an issue with IRQ affinity. It's important in a router to make sure all cores are used by the network. In addition, iperf itself sucks a huge amount of CPU, and in a real router it will not be present, all the activity will remain in the kernel, so even with just two cores it's possible that you could manage to forward 10G.

[TyrHeimdal]

I don't wanna ruin your day, but iperf3 is single-threaded. Hence why you see core #4 being absolutely trashed, while the others are essentially idle. If you want to see the full picture of throughput, either use iperf2 or run multiple instances of iperf3.

Also AES-NI is pretty important if you want to do any kind of VPN or other stuff that uses symmetric encryption. Without it, the CPU has to deal with raw encryption/decryption, rather than natively having a compatible instruction set to do it.

That being said, CPU improvements for the past 10 years are mostly elsewhere than in the raw clock frequence. We should step away from determining processing power in GHz.

Cool video overall, keep up the good work - earned a new sub!

[tinygriffy]

I built that thing ! (after watching your video) Thanks ! Set me back 80 € and 3 hours of work, with NIC+PCIe-cable and storage. running OpenWRT routing a 500/100Mbit upstream. (and it does so admirably so far)

[StevenDLeary]

Thanks for this one! Really an inexpensive but useful build. Lets take it up a notch though... rather than OpenWRT, how would you change this build for pfSense?