Thanks for the replies Fellas… Found out what was happening.... I originally tried pfSense followed by M0n0wall and some others. I was experiencing the same issues. I did try to connect to by using an IP address but it would just lay there and look at me. I dug deeper by looking into the firewall logs of one of the servers providing shares and found that it was complaining about connection attempts from ports 137-139 (Old Windows 2000 and XP PCs) and also port 445 from the Win 7 boxes.  445?    I had to look that one up.  It seems that this port (Discovery Server Port) is the replacement for the old NetBIOS ports 137-139. I allowed port 445 on the file server and I was able to connect a share by name. Cool.... But not finished. Now when you try to connect to a share you cannot see the rest of the network. You have to go into: Control_panel --> Network and Sharing Center --> Change Advanced sharing settings and enable "Turn on Network Discovery". This allowed me to see all of the other members of my group. The Firewall is working well. I upgraded all of the Win 7 boxes to Service Pack 1 to give the firewall/gateway a workout and it was not even sweating (2.8GHz, 512MB, 80GB, w/2 100mb links). I have a 22Mb/s down and 5Mb/s up Comcast link so everything went real fast. One other note.... If any of you are reading this and still have trouble with XP and 2000 connecting then go to the PC that is providing the share and go into that PC's firewall software and tell it to specifically allow your PC (by IP Address) to use ports 137-139. I did this with McAfee and it worked. Why all of this broke when I put pfsense online still baffles me. I was still on the same LAN so pfsense should have not been involved. When pfsense was disconnected everything worked without any modifications. Most peculiar. Thanks again for your help!!!! Darius

It might get a bit tedious repeatedly connecting to the pfSense GUI and entering the details so another option would be be to (for example) create a shell script on the pfSense box in the office to issue the appropriate wol command and then invoke it by ssh from home. (Might need to do this under a user other than admin.) On the pfSense box you could add static arp entries by shell command but they will disappear on pfSense reboot. I believe the pfSense config file can include shell commands to be executed at startup (see the Shellcmd package and the discussion in, for example http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,34391.0.html ).

Also, your source port will not be 443, that's your destination port.

Have you tried reading the documentation and searching the forum? Much of what you ask is trivially found with even just a cursory review of the documentation.

First, you should be on 1.2.3, not 1.2.2. (Or even 2.0 at this point) Package installs do not require a reboot. For bandwidthd, all you need to do is go to Services > BandwidthD and set whatever settings you want, save, and then wait a bit for it to make the graphs. You can make a backup before you install if you want, no need to backup the whole HD. Just go to Diagnostics > Backup/Restore and download a backup. If something goes wrong, you can reinstall (From CD, embedded image, etc) and then just restore your config file and it will go back to the way it was.

On 2.0 you can edit the gateways and weight them appropriately based on how fast they are. For instance, my cable is about three times faster than my DSL, so I have my Cable set to a weight of 3, and DSL to 1. If you are on 1.2.3 there is a trick you can do the same way, just add your faster connection to the LB pool multiple times and that will use it that much more often. So in my example above, I'd add my Cable to the LB pool three times. In both cases, out of every four connections I make, three go over Cable, one over DSL.

I fixed it all with a simple change… Made the AP vlan the native vlan(example, vlan200) instead of vlan1.. everything works like a charm now. Thank you very much for your help :)

So I just rebooted the pfsense machine and now it's fast!

You probably need to set a firewall rule, above your load balancing rule, that sends traffic with destination 'your mail server' through one wan only. You could try using sticky connections if your running 2.0. See this thread for a similar problem. Steve

Is there a way to undo this without restarting pfsense?

Yes to those questions but… From the questions you are asking it seems as though you are trying to reconfigure a pfSense box you didn't setup yourself? Please explain your situation a little more so we can provide a more helpful level of answer!  :) Steve

Ok, thanks for that. I'll play around with it.

should be possible with a radius server i guess