install rrd summary or vnstat2 package… They should help you

Hi, hmm  bridging is not a good option here because services would affect each other eg. dhcp gateway. I think that dont work very well. I would prefer option 2 because: -devided networks -prevent broadcast traffic over wireless network -failover possible and more easy (the failover gateway is the wlan interface ip adress of the opposite pfsense) cya

The denyhosts package will help block ssh script kitties. Yes this is a port scan being run against you by many script kitties. I would suggest changing the SSH port to something other than 22 (like 222). This will prevent these types of attacks.

Sometimes it takes other people to point out the obvious (been there myself many times). It could have been almost anything, the trouble is that cheap unmanaged switches have no diagnostics, so it's impossible to tell what's gone wrong. Buying a managed switch (Mikrotik's RB250GS is one cheap 5 port option) gives you a better chance to diagnose that type of fault.

You could just add firewall rules to your wireless interface to allow it to access the internet. No need to swap LAN and OPT1 (unless I missed something). It looks to me that on my system the web server (lighttpd) will accept incoming connections to any address, not just the address of the LAN interface. Indeed I was able to connect to it from a system on an OPTx interface.

Thank you very much for this answer which is certainly going to help me.

Ahhh… ok, much thanks!  Sorry for the belated response!

In general it is recommended to NOT mix use of parent interface with VLANs. There are complications if bridges are involved. See the FreeBSD man pages for vlan and bridge.

Now i need to get some add-ons to do what i signed up for. Web filtering based on mac address - is this possible Web tracking - track what sites people have been on Squid - Is this easy to setup?

Awesome!! Thank you for the response. I'll give this a shot.

Not to dig too deeply into failure analysis, but I've found a huge difference between crap quality and good quality PS's. The crap capacitors dry out quicker, and the cheap bronze bearings in the fans (Another big failure point) gum up, dry out, and fail. After disassembling about 50 random failed PS's, Capacitors were the biggest failure, and the fans were often on the verge of failure, if not failed. When it fails, a crap PS can also take out the HD, MB, Memory, and even KB and mouse. I've seen it happen more than once. On the other hand, I wouldn't trust the most reliable drive in the world. Especially with modern drives, it's not a matter of if, but when.