If you want to do strictly routing, add an allow all rule on the WAN interface, use it for whatever network has your default gateway, disable NAT, and you have a router. WAN needs to be the interface that has your default gateway.

VMWare will perform better on your hardware.  I don't believe that 2.8ghz CPU has the Intel VT-x hardware and since FreeBSD 6.2 won't run as a Xen domU (or even dom0) pfSense will perform at uhh… 0% on it ;)

--Bill

;D its ok i've solved it…

three issues.

1. over tired (been network bashing for 14 hrs straight).
2. impaitent.
3. no mac address spoofing.

basically i'd added the mac spoofing originally and not waited for the reload to take effect, not tested a ping and decided it didnt work because the ip still said none...I then messed around with all my vm network settings until i went cross eyed.

I went through everything again SLOWLY and its working...

feel a bit of a chump now lol

Sorry, silly me, you said win2003.  It will be easier not to use NAT (which will just giove you a whole new layer of problems.

If yo uset up a new VMWare network, you can bridge it to the wireless NIC in the VMWare Host Virtual Network Mapping screen.  Your VM should then pick up an address through DHCP if you want it to, or configure by hand if it won't.

You need windoze to be able to pick up and use the wireless card first of course.  Can you run the host machine over WiFi?

Looks like you have the same subnet at WAN and at LAN. This is a conflict. You need unique subnets.

@Pootle:

BaNZ, have you spread the channels that your wireless APs use?  Also are you getting any interference from other wireless nearby?  You should also make sure that that the APs are as far apart as you can manage.  Best thing would be to try with just one on then see what happens as you add the others.

Yes, I've checked my neighbour channel and changed to a different one. I've changed my channel to 3 and I tried 4 / 5. I found out it's not interference. Its something to do with my cheap AP and pfsense. If I connect my AP to pfsense all the clients on the AP gets around 50-70k/s and if I turn on a p2p application I get 20-40k/s. This is really strange because if I plug a router directly to pfsense it is perfectly fine and I get my max speed. So I took my AP and plug it in directly to WAN instead of going through AP, this works fine too I get my max speed. This proves that my AP is working. When I check my AP in the dhcp page on pfsense it shows its offline. But after pinging the AP from pfsense it shows online and brings the speed up to around 100k/s. But if I reset the AP it will again show its offline and the speed drops down again.

I tried to plug another wifi router and I get my max speed fine. So it is definitely something wrong with the AP with pfsense. I tried fiddling around the threshold in my AP and it improves it slightly but not much. I probably gonna have to get a new wifi router. Or maybe use pfsense->router->ap since I have a spare router lying somewhere and I can save some money.

update: bought new wifi router and plugged it in.

It is now fine. Had a problem earlier when I'm transferring large files, basically it kills all other clients connection when there is a huge amount of traffic. I changed the channel and it is fine.

Thanks!  Great Wiki.

thanks for the reply. after much thinkering i found out the iso i downloaded was corupted checked the md5. sry for wasting ya time

@YoMarK:

If you're having timing problems when running pfSense as a VM, make sure that /boot/loader.conf contains the following lines:
kern.hz="100"
hint.apic.0.disabled=1

We are running a few pfSense(simple routers) Vm's on Vmware ESX here, and ntpdate offsets are minimum.

@rsw686:

One of the other issues I see is time keeping. A vmware machine has an emulated hardware clock which is not accurate. My linux vm varies by a few minutes.

On Linux you can install Vmware Tools in the Vm. The tools then do direct time synchronization with the hosts hardware clock. This is very accurate.
Unfortuanatly The Vmware tools for FreeBSD are not as good as the Linux ones.
(Howver the solution above seems to be working fine)

The VMware tools for linux work fine with 32bit guests. The problem is when using a 64bit guest. They fail to keep it accurate. Even with the kernel args "clock=pit nosmp noapic nolapic" I still had this issue. The only work around I found was to enable ntpd and disable the backup time clock in the ntpd config and its been working great.

only way your gettin 15 here is uncapping and or buying a few t1s :P i know personally i could max a t3 but hell..dont think that ATT has large trunks in this area…ill probably be the biggest cost effective ISP..no one here wants to pay 40+ for a 6mbit line :P

link you 2end nic to the vmnet2 network

Could you please tell me how to do this?

i tried couple of settings from vmware virtual network settings but i could not get it to work.
how to do this. please elaborate.

Thanks for your reply.

i did some more testing and somehow i believe that VmWare Bridging and WLAN dont go well together ^^"

when i'm at home in and bridge the virtual pfsense WAN to hostmachine WLAN the pfsense recieve an IP from my wlan but cant communicate with anything on WAN. i cant even ping the hostmachine.

i searched some forums and read some threads that VmWare Bridging is newly working on linux but i didnt find any information about windows so i assumed it is working, but apparently it is not :D

@ChillyWilly:

Well the e1000 interfaces give me about 1.2 mbyte, so thats right in the middle.

The PIII 866 is gonna be replaced bij a P4 2.8ghz machine so throughput won't be a problem then.

Thats good to hear.  Please bench the 2.8ghz box when you get it in production.  I am curious how fast it will go.

@namezero:

Will report back in two days.

Good luck and be sure to edit the .vmx file and change the nic type out to e1000

What is wrong with Diagnostics -> Edit file?