The Alix is the LX800 (500mhz / 256 RAM) with 2x LAN + 2x mPCI.

The card is an Atheros AR5006XS - this card:
http://www.netgate.com/product_info.php?cPath=26_34&products_id=474
http://www.atheros.com/pt/AR5006XS.htm

It was the same price as the other units, and I thought Engenuis was pretty solid.

I have it set to 50% tx power, and have everything set to run through the right antenna, no diversity.

There are a couple of other APs, but they are about 1500-2000 feet away, and running on non-overlapping channels.

I'm also interested in testing FreeBSD 7 wireless so I have been watching this closely. PFSense 1.3 will be based on FreeBSD 7 a snapshot (early test version) will hopefully be out soon at http://snapshots.pfsense.com/ for additional information take a look at:

http://blog.pfsense.org/?p=174
http://blog.pfsense.org/?p=173

Does the hardware have some powersaving settings in the bios? Looks like the usbdevice becomes disabled? Maybe try running with disabled acpi (see http://devwiki.pfsense.org/BootOptions )?

If you have the option you should switch to something non-usb-based for that wifi link. I think pci or minipci should give you more reliability.

@jahonix:

Are draft-N mini-PCI W-Lan cards available?

They're starting to show up. Here's a rebranded Wistron draft-n card with an Atheros chipset:
http://discountechnology.com/Netegriti-802-11n-802-11g-802-11b-802-11a-Turbo-Mini-PCI-Wireless-Card
By the time there is software support for N, they should be pretty easy to find.

Bridge in station mode will not work. Bridge will only work in AP mode, the other end will have to be a wireless bridge unit of some sort. You can not bridge a wireless station interface in freebsd. In order to do this you will need to have something like linux ebtables, and as far as I know it does not exist for freebsd.

ifconfig ath0 list caps to show the different speeds/modes
then ex.:
ifconfig media DS/11Mbps or whatever you want to set it to.

You should see a (+) Icon at interfaces>assign if the interface is detected and not yet assigned. Just hit it and the interface should appear as OPTx. If there is no (+) icon though the card is installed it's not detected for some reason.

afaik nobody added or even played around with this yet.

Very cool, thank you.  Don't know how I missed the status -> wireless page.  Thought I had been to every page…

Thank you.

@Issacsim:

I selected TKIP for WPA Pairwise and it started working.

This also fixed my AirTunes!  May work for others in the future with AirPort Express and other Apple products (keyword stuffing there for future searches :)). It stopped working at some point (apparently when I changed this from TKIP, which I don't recall doing but am sure I did at some point) and is another thing I didn't have time to look into fixing.

Thanks again for posting this, took care of a couple problems for me.  ;D

If your clients do not find the wireless network then the problem seems to be related to your Netgear WAP.
But since you don't post more helpful informations this is an all chris-tal ball © solution.

7447 tx failed 'cuz FIFO underrun

I found when this happens, my wireless connection drops and reconnects kinda transparently. The result was that traffic goes very high, then dips very very lo and high again. Many spikes while using high bandwidth applications like newsgroups and torrents.

Is this what you ar experiencing?

Thanks I will check it out.

Since this has gone to the topic of DNS, Wireless, and Active directory do you want me to start a new thread involving that somewhere else on the forum.

Thanks
Eckman

@http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic:

If you want to force your clients to send their traffic over the VPN you need to set some custom options:
Please read the following thread for more infos:
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,6056.0.html

read the man pages.
i think i remember reading somewhere you have to leave the dev1 out if the server is in the same subnet

In my case WIFI and LAN are different subnets so I think it should be OK (ie routed not bridged).

Thanks for the link to the other topic, some useful tips in there

Dean

Try to create a rule and it should work :)

(keyword: filtering bridge)