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@mddubs: About the Xbox, having an "Open NAT" status compared to anything else is a night and day difference, a must have.  I thought I tried forwarding the thousands of ports necessary and still had a "Strict NAT" status until I enabled uPNP.  I can't remember, maybe I'll look into it again. Interesting. I enabled uPNP for my (borrowed) 360 and it still detected strict NAT. Maybe I was doing it wrong. Anyway, I could be wrong, and you never know until you try, but I really think with the VPN1401 you'll be fine. db

I believe this is the NIC showing up bellow.  It's a D-Link DWL-G520 ath0: <atheros 5212="">mem 0x7ebe0000-0x7ebeffff irq 16 at device 7.0 on pci3 ath0: [ITHREAD] ath0: unable to attach hardware; HAL status 3 device_attach: ath0 attach returned 6</atheros> Yes, that NIC won't be visible because the ath driver wasn't entirely happy with it. You might get further by using a pfSense built on a more modern FreeBSD. Try one of the recent 1.2.3 snapshot builds which can be downloaded from http://snapshots.pfsense.org/FreeBSD_RELENG_7_2/pfSense_RELENG_1_2/updates/

Could you elaborate on The speed drops when surfing, but not downloading, playing games or playing video of youtube. What speed drops while surfing? The speed of downloads you have running at the same time? If so, from what to what?  Its not clear to me what you are comparing with what.

@tnine: Is it possible to change an existing installation to use the appliance install? I couldn't find anything on that in the docs. If I were to try, this is what I would do. Again, I've never tried and I definitely don't guarantee it will not destroy your existing installation. echo embedded > /etc/platform and then use the firmware update page in the GUI to install the embedded image. As for a new install of embedded, this is not done using the Live CD. You have to download the embedded image then use dd or physdiskwrite to write the image directly to the boot device. These instructions are what you're looking for: http://m0n0.ch/wall/installation_generic.php db

@ermal: You can do a port forward too. could you please tell me how? THANK YOU! massi

I've used m0n0wall on alix and soekris boards, and pfsense on soekris. I prefer the soekris hardware, but both are nice and compact, low power. If you get tired of asterisk you can install the freeswitch package on pfsense, like I did. The freeswitch package is well-supported and maturing rapidly. (The freeswitch software itself appears to be rock-solid. When I say the package is maturing rapidly, I'm referring to the GUI, which is heroicly maintained by mcrane.) db

It might be worth trying a more up-to-date build which is based on FreeBSD 7.2. See http://snapshots.pfsense.org/FreeBSD_RELENG_7_2/pfSense_RELENG_1_2/updates/

Thank you!

Just placing here the solution for this problem after so many months. Basically it was an MTU issue, even though im using a PPPoE to PPPoA bridge one would assume I would need to set the mtu to 1492. But that would not help, I had to set the MTU down to 1454 so that everything finally worked normally on my linux machines. Oddly the windows machines were never affected no matter what value was set.