I posted about 5 years ago in this thread (https://community.sophos.com/products/unified-threat-management/f/52/p/27731/83797) with the details of my first home build of a dedicated Astaro UTM to protect my family from outside threats (and from themselves sometimes). After many years of protection with v8.x, I finally decided to upgrade to Sophos UTM v9.x and felt I should also upgrade the hardware. Since I came here (actually to the old Astaro board a few months ago) looking for ideas and gleaned some good input, I wanted to share what I purchased for the benefit of others.
I kept the the same $40 APEX Black Steel Mini-ITX Tower Computer Case with 250w Power Supply that I purchased 5 years ago, but replaced everything else. The Intel D510 Atom motherboard and processor worked really well for me these past 5 years, but just aren't enough for the features in 9.x according to what I read here. So, I purchased 3 components:
- BIOSTAR Hi-Fi B85N 3D LGA 1150 Intel B85 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Mini ITX Intel Motherboard for $49.99 after rebate from NewEgg.com.
- G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory for $61.99 from NewEgg.com.
- Intel Core i3-4170 3M Haswell Dual-Core 3.7 GHz LGA 1150 54W for $104.99 from NewEgg.com through eBay.com. They were sold out in their website, but were selling the same processor on eBay for $20 less.
- Intel 180GB SSD for $0. This drive was previously used in my laptop and had been laying around since I replaced it with a larger SSD many months ago.
Total upgrade cost was $216.97 for another (hopefully) 5 years of protection via Sophos UTM. :-)
So far everything has been great. The number of watts used according to my smart UPS has been the same as with the Atom processor. I guess that is due to the Haswell power saving features. The motherboard included dual NICs, so I no longer needed my Intel dual-NIC PCI card, which didn't work in this motherboard anyway. The SSD definitely makes it boot-up quickly, but other than that may not be too valuable. It was free anyway. ;-)
The CPU applet on the dashboard (when it worked prior to this latest version upgrade), hardly registered a blip. I have the following features turned on: Firewall, IPS, Web Filter, Network Awareness, AntiVirus (Dual-Scanning), and AntiSpyware. I plan to enable remote access and utilize the endpoint protection clients in the future as well.
16GB of RAM is probably a bit much for this as well. It's been as high as 13% utilized. But, it wasn't expensive and will last me 5 years and potentially an upgrade to the XG Firewall. Although I see the license there only allows for 6GB. It'll be a while before I make the move as I'm well aware of the dangers of being a first-adopter or early updater. I got a little anxious with my first upgrade and launched the upgrade to 9.352-6 before checking the forums. Oh well. :-)
Anyway, I wish everyone a good Christmas and Happy New Year.
Thanks Sophos Team for continuing to make the Astaro UTM free for home users.
This thread was automatically locked due to age.
