@eriksson25: Oki, I see. Can I use my pfsense machine as radius server as well? Or do I need a seperate machine? There is a package for pfsense called "freeradius2". This can be installed on pfsense with GUI integration - as all other packages for pfsense, too. A documentation can be found here: http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/FreeRADIUS_2.x_package

@dvserg: My opinion is the total number of users is irrelevant. It is important to how many simultaneous connections PPOoE you can give on your IP subnet. This determines the load on the server. i changed the maximum users of PPPOE server from config.xml to  50000 number . but the problem is that the pfsence menu and web interface is loading very very slow. i see the interfaces added. 13000 interfaces added with name of poes10(0) ~ poes12600(0) to my interface assign list

You just have to select pppoe on the interface you want to initiate the pppoe connection and insert your login/password. I do this on a VM with two adsl connection and it works quite fine.

Wanted to thank you for this.  I disabled ECN myself and set all queues with a priority of five or less to a queue limit of 1000 packets per second on my 50/5 cable connection. Dropped packets disappeared on unsaturated connections and running a speed test on speedtest.net, reliably improved my speeds a bit.

There's no way that hardware should be restricting you. Commonly this can be a duplex problem, check ifconfig. Though that would often result in an even lower throughput. Steve

/usr/local/bin/rrdtool: No such file or directory That's the important part. Something removed rrdtool (perhaps uninstalling ntop). If you're on i386: pkg_add -r http://files.pfsense.org/packages/8/All/rrdtool-1.2.30_1.tbz If you're on amd64: pkg_add -r http://files.pfsense.org/packages/amd64/8/All/rrdtool-1.2.30_1.tbz

If you're familiar with packet traces, I'd try loading up Wireshark on either the laptop (probably best case) or a server that you're connecting to and see what that tells you.

@tomdlgns: hopefully the OP has the same issue as i did. I did.  Thanks.

@vatson: In order to be able to update the BIOS, I had to temporarily install Linux (I used SLES11 SP1, because that's what I happened to have at hand). Well, You didn't have to :) Install Dell Repository Manager somewhere, take Dell Service DVD (now the latest version is 7.0.0), download SUU Linux repository for Your server, then expose it over NFS, and then run update of BIOS and all firmwares at once from this DVD.. I did it recently and strongly recommend this method, since we've failed with different firmware update method, which rendered Dell server unbootable..

wow good job! and thank you

Aha, thanks! Here's the output: sysctl kern.timecounter sysctl kern.timecounter kern.timecounter.tick: 1 kern.timecounter.choice: TSC(-100) HPET(900) ACPI-fast(1000) i8254(0) dummy(-1000000) kern.timecounter.hardware: ACPI-fast kern.timecounter.stepwarnings: 0 kern.timecounter.tc.i8254.mask: 65535 kern.timecounter.tc.i8254.counter: 4775 kern.timecounter.tc.i8254.frequency: 1193182 kern.timecounter.tc.i8254.quality: 0 kern.timecounter.tc.ACPI-fast.mask: 4294967295 kern.timecounter.tc.ACPI-fast.counter: 976318787 kern.timecounter.tc.ACPI-fast.frequency: 3579545 kern.timecounter.tc.ACPI-fast.quality: 1000 kern.timecounter.tc.HPET.mask: 4294967295 kern.timecounter.tc.HPET.counter: 3457380201 kern.timecounter.tc.HPET.frequency: 14318180 kern.timecounter.tc.HPET.quality: 900 kern.timecounter.tc.TSC.mask: 4294967295 kern.timecounter.tc.TSC.counter: 1185842065 kern.timecounter.tc.TSC.frequency: 2695108768 kern.timecounter.tc.TSC.quality: -100 kern.timecounter.smp_tsc: 0 kern.timecounter.invariant_tsc: 1 sysctl kern.hz kern.hz: 1000 Edit: I've now tried setting kern.timecounter.hardware to HPET, TSC, i8254, and ACPI-fast manually and rebooting after each (in /etc/sysctl.conf). None of the settings have been any better than the other. The instant I use something that takes a lot of bandwidth (I have a 100/10 connection) the clock goes shooting off into hyperspeed.

@SectorNine50: Figure I might as well do 64-bit, just in case there is some sudden mass exodus away from 32-bit in the future…  ;) You're probably safe with 32 bit up until Y2K38. ;) At that point, probably won't be possible to run 32 bit anymore. But I sure hope it isn't a sudden mass exodus in early 2038.  :P

You can probably run pfSense on those door stops, depending which model they are. Steve

Hmm, well I'm glad you're up and running but I have no idea why it worked/didn't work.  ::) Steve