Thanks for the reply, I have already set to promiscous mode in ESX, otherwise it would not work at all. The current setup does work in general except the weird arp problem and yes I am using it as a filtering bridge.

Thank you. Was hoping there was a magic answer.

What I meant by one of these cards is…

Wired --> LAN
Wired --> WAN
Wireless --> WAN2
Wireless --> LAN2 (broadcast) will setup in host. thanks again.

Because virtualisation provides no security, and indeed weakens security (as it can only introduce vulnerabilities).

Also, Xen doesn't yet support FreeBSD as a dom0, making the point rather moot ;)

I managed to fix it. On the DSL modem itself there was on option where you can actually set the DHCP lease time. It was set by default to every 10 minutes. I set it to 365 days and seems to have fixed the problem. I'm not sure why it was not a problem before with our old pfsense box. But I guess the problem for the time being is resolved.

Would just like to add one thing here.

This method was great because I am able to use the compatibility of linux's wireless cards that freebsd/pfsense does not. For Example my wireless N Draft cards.

@cmb:

I was seeing this on 1.2.1 also, but thought it was something weird going on with my system as it worked on other systems and nobody else has reported any issues after a few thousand downloads.

The 1.2.2 VM is available now and it doesn't do that for me at least.

That solved it!!  I spend close to a week trying to understand what was going on, it worked first try with 1.2.2

Thanks

I had the same problem and solved it by switching to Intel Pro/1000 T-Server network adapters.

Apparently it's a bug in FreeBSD, see http://eligere.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/virtualbox-156-freebsd-70-and-pcnet-fast-iii-problem/

Unfortunately, I figured it out after messing around for quite some time.
Perhaps a notice should be added to the download page, since it's pretty common to try it under a VM.

Edit: I'm using VirtualBox 2.0.6

If you want to keep the firewall rule functionality so you can filter packets, you can just disable NAT by going to NAT, Outbound, change it to manual and delete the rule. This will allow it to function strictly as a router with the ability to filter packets.

@Cry:

If the adapter is supported by FreeBSD then yes it's possible.  However, if you connect to a USB 1 port you'll be limited at a maximum of 12 Mb/s.  VMWare probably has some overhead too, so whatever theoretical bandwidth you're expecting, you'll probably get less.

Just trying to see whether it works. What do u mean by "supported by FreeBSD then yes it's possible." I want this USB doggle to act like my wireless AP. Or can i hook up my trusty wrt54g to do the job? which is better?

I have one ethernet adapter on my motherboard.

Kinda late I know…but if you are using ESX...you just use VGT to allow VLAN Tagging through to the guest OS (pfSense). To do this, you setup a Virtual Switch with a VLAN ID number of 4095 - this means that all VLAN info will bypass the standard VMware and be passed right through to the guest.

I use this instead of Virtual IPs because these IPs are pingable (the Virtual IP ones are not because of the way that ESX handles the CARP stuff from pfsense)

I am doing this here with great success.

Also, I would recommend changing your NIC to use the e1000 adapter instead of the standard one.

Jim

Do Not use VMware 6.5, v6.0 working fine…..

That was the reason why I assumed, that CARP interfaces could take settings from physical ones. To be more correct - vmnics (but in this post I would chose to name them physical - NICs, which are assigned to VM during VM setup from console, but not physical NICs on server hardware). My vmx file does contain only records assigned to these "physical" nics.

ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"
..
..
ethernet3.virtualDev = "e1000"

CARP interfaces are created in VM using web GUI configuration. Should I manually add these drivers to vmx file? How about limitations on VM to have maximum 4 vmnics?