As I digressed in my last post, virtualizing pfSense wasn’t as difficult as I expected. From what I’d read online I was afraid it would have some adverse affect on network performance, especially considering most of my “infrastructure” is reclaimed, second-hand, or otherwise cast-off from production use. It fully appears, however, that these fears were unfounded (standard Spectrum cable, don’t judge): Physical 32bit Xen Virtualized 64bit Barely noticeable, and honestly well within the standard variance of such types of throughput tests.

In my last post, I briefly rambled about my early hands-on with FreeBSD. Today I’m going to expound a bit, and maybe show some pictures. Saucy! Since my early experiments in VirtualBox showed such ease and promise, I found some physical hardware to continue with: That’s TrueOS installing all right, on the powerhouse that is the Acer AspireONE Netbook. This mighty beast has a quad-core Atom CPU, with a full 2GB of RAM.

For lots of reasons, lately I’ve been pretty interested in the various BSD variants, notably FreeBSD. This has a lot to do with my current choice of firewall software (pfSense) being based on it, which thanks to recent changes I’m looking at virtualizing instead of running dedicated hardware for. More on that later, I think. I’ll admit, I’ve always seen the BSD family as better suited to embedded-type applications, probably largely due to pfSense being my primary exposure to it.

Update Oct 20, 2017 As pointed out in the comments below, most of this is no longer needed since the official release of the telegraf package for pfSense 2.4 and above. I'm still leaving it up for posterity. If any of the pfSense folks read this, some extra configuration options on the settings page for the plugin would be nice to see; but otherwise works like a charm. If you’re like me, a sexy looking dashboard is a difficult thing to look away from.