OK, thanks for that, will just have to change a few static ip assignments when I go "live" on the pfsense using PPPOE to WAN and bypassing the old router
Guessing the 109.190.0.52 is your IP from that example, at least judging by the fact the bandwidth is downstream. Something is doing ANY lookups on ripe.net and isc.org, which generate very large responses, at an absurd pace. Nothing on a stock pfSense install will generate any queries even remotely like that. Switch the capture to LAN and see if you see the requests there. In a default configuration, the only way any queries like that could possibly be initiated would be by something on an internal network.
In 2.1 it will also send a notification when a dyndns host changes, and if you have smtp notifications enabled, it will result in an e-mail sent to you when it updates the dyndns hostname.
DynDNS is definitely the way to go for that, then just use the hostname and you really don't need to care what the IP is.
You are clearly more familiar with this than me! ;)
Personally I would be using this only for logging pfSense.
In the embedded install of pfSense the /var is a ram drive that's lost when you reboot. Clearly unsuitable for longterm logging. But as long as this is user selectable it's probably safer to force people to make a decision rather than potentially causing damage to solid state storage.
To preface this, I have been doing networking a LONG time, and actually know it quite well.
To answer your question, I need a lot more information about what you are trying to divide, and from how many people. As an example, Vlan vs discreet nics; A vlan can be busted out of and you can see all traffic, as well as load on one is (to some extent) load on all. But you can not do trunk ports on discreet nics…
Do a firmware upgrade to a snapshot build of pfSense 2.1 which is based on FreeBSD 8.3, one of the current versions. If you still have problems submit a FreeBSD problem report including the pfSense crash report.
I suspect it will be difficult to persuade any of the FreeBSD maintainers to look at problems in FreeBSD 8.1 (used in pfSense 2.0.1).
I want to dispatch users in different VLANs depending on their MAC Addressses.
I don't understand what you mean - do you want to be able to plug in computers at various points in your network and have them assigned a VLAN dependent on the MAC address and independent of the connection point? If so, I suspect this would need special software in the computer as well as special software on some server.
i have made a few changes to config files like spamassassin's local.cf
On startup, pfSense regenerates all configuration files for applications installed through pfSense from a single configuration file maintained by the pfSense web GUI. Thus configuration flle changes made outside the web GUI are lost on startup.
Use the web GUI to tweak application configuration; don't edit application specific configuration files.
