I just intstalled pfSense on ESX 3.5 U4, every thing seems to work except, incoming NAT ports.  All the ports I have setup for incoming NAT don't seem to work.  The firewall logs show all the traffic getting through.  Outgoing traffic from the LAN works but incoming traffic doesn't seem to work.  I tried to setup both SSH and RDP, testing all done from external side.  I'm very familiar with rotuers  / networks, however, this is the first time I've use pfSense.  Pretty sure I have it configured correctly….. I've tried both the 2.0 alpha code and the current stable release. 1.2.2.

I've got about 20 pfsense vm's running without any problems running ver 3.5.2 I have done quite a bit of serious testing with pfsense and have had not issues like the one you have described. I would be looking at /var/log/messages and kernel message to get to the "root" of the issue.

I just rebuilt my PF-Sense server back on my XenServer 5.0  Enterprise Edition.  It is working like a charm.  I am using verison: 1.2.3-PRERELEASE-TESTING-VERSION built on Sat Mar 28 00:13:48 EDT 2009 It is extreamly stable and very fast.  I am running serveral services and seeing a little slow response but I am will to take that with all the new virus's running around.  A little extra protection is work it. As far as my configuration goes: I have a dedicated nic for the WAN interface, LAN interface and a shared interface on the OPT1 interface.  No issues here. Citrix is now providing enterprise product for free.  It works great. RC

I put this one out on the FreeBSD forum that I am on.  I have not gotten close to running out of disk space but it would be nice to know how to do it. RC

Edit your vm image to select the mode of the network adapter, ie. Bridge, NAT, Host, Custom.

@Elactos: How to you configure the pfsense and vmware server 2.0 to be able to get pfsense ip's to my other network card? I've both tried looking in the config myself and searched but I don't get it. What should I do? I have to real nics on the servers, one in and one out. I have added to vrtual nics on pfsense, one that gets ip from my router (which is correct) and the other makes its own ip. How to I get the own ip out to other computer in the network? This reply is just for future reference. It sounds like the NIC's are configured in NAT mode. You need to have both in Bridge mode (or at least the LAN VNIC should be in bridged) . This makes the interfaces accessible from outside the HOST.

Hey guys, I have ESXi @ Home Running several ubuntu boxes and im using the aforementioned VM appliance to serve internet to my entire household… it works really well, have squid and squid reporter running on it. works a treat! Only weird thing is that phpsysinfo show more ram being used than the system page?!? any ideas? cheers

ESX always uses bridge modus(NAT is a Vmware Server/Workstation feature), and works just fine with pfSense(why wouldn't it ?). Edit: ESX: In ESX you normally connect a physical interface to a virtual switch. Then you can connect your VM's to your virtual switch. So if you want pfSense to function as a router/firewall, you should at least create 2 virtual switches, for example WAN and LAN.

I had basicly same problem installing in the vmware server I found that my network links in the virtual machine even though showing bridged from what I understand now it was the main bridged adapeter rather then vmnet2/vmnet3 I recomend you go back to http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Installing_pfSense_in_vmware_under_windows and look at Summery of Virtual Machine settings picture there then go back and make sure you have actually selected the vmnet2 in your actual virtual machine.  After I linked the adapter correctly there my pppoe connection worked.

@jgalgay: I concur.   I want to run PFSense within an OpenVZ containter. Are  the issues with containerizing FreeBSD … or with PFSense providing the security / services from within an OpenVZ container ? JJG From the OpenVZ Wikipedia article: "OpenVZ is limited in that it requires both the host and guest OS to be Linux" Seems that you have a technology issue. –Bill

Ahh ok. So I will have to reboot to try this solution. (to check the bios) I am running OpenSuse 11.0 on the box in question. 2.6.25 kernel. an intel x86_64 . I just checked the "my computer" window in KDE, it said that the cpu speed was changing. So this could be the problem. It will be a while for me to try this as the server is in production and I do not want to take it down for 20-30+ min with out notice.

I just happened to run across this today during my beta testing of ESX 4.  It's going to be really sweet when I get CPUs that can actually do it.  The stuff in ESX 4 is unreal.  I cannot wait till it goes RTM.

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.