One of the many differences is iperf is in userland and packets moving to/from the network must go through kernel space to the userland, which is a lot of extra overhead. You can tweak the OS to be better at this, but sometimes comes as other costs. As a router/firewall, the packets stay in the kernel and certain optimizations can be done.

Hi, I'm new to this forum. I hope you can help me. CoinTos can you post me same example of apcupsd command you use on Shellcmd? Thank's in advance.

Thanks all for your help. However, none of the steps were able to resolve my issue. Here is the link I followed to resolve my issue http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-to-pfsense-configure-network-interface-as-a-bridge-network-switch/ This can be closed now. Thanks.

Want to join a friend online to work.

@guardian: Good point… I've been staring at the port side of the box because of where it's mounted, so I forgot about those holes, so I could see possibly doing that. Only thing is, if that is a serial port, wouldn't it show in dmesg?  I don't have the FreeBSD background to know how to probe for the UART. So before cracking open the case and risking physical damage I would want to: Step 1: Detect the presence of a UART though software to determine if it exists and what it's hardware is. Step 2: Determine if there is a driver for that hardware, and if it needs CTS/RTS flow control to operate. If I get though 1 & 2, then I'd do a test with the box open, and if that passed, I'd worry about making it pretty, but unless I get 1 and 2 figured out first, don't want to put the effort into the physical stuff. **An aside: Also, how to you reassemble the unit.  I looked inside when I installed memory and SSD, and that heat sink arrangement looked pretty scary to put back together if the motherboard was removed. ** BTW… does your original image file have higher resolution of the components around that connector? When I looked at it, my first guess was that it was power to support a SATA device plugged into the SATA port. I think your best bet is to switch one of your 8 KVM devices to use the serial console and change your pfSense box to that open KVM connection. I agree that we should be seeing the serial port show up in dmesg if it was detected on the motherboard. Do you have any serial or com port settings in the BIOS? I also agree that putting this machine back together may be difficult with the heatsink

@Codeman20400: so i've changed some things about…specifically, the AP is now directly connected to the OPT1 interface with a 192.168.2.0 subnet, and clients can connect and be assigned an IP...how should i adjust to give these clients web access? and there was no bridging taking place before -edit: It lives! must have been pure luck that it worked before...i changed my AP back to the LAN, leaving OPT1 active, but disconnected...and otherwise my network has risen from its own ashes...Thanks and huzzah! anytime! Glad you got it working

I have seen someone attach three NICs to the same WAN switch to attempt this, but it did not work well over time. It may function, but it can be quirky. Only one interface in the subnet will have a link route, so traffic may enter one NIC and leave another.

Thanks Jimp. Again, I appreciate your time looking into it.

Thank you both for clarifying  !

@johnpoz: And what are these AP.. support of multiple SSIDs does not always mean they support vlan tagging of the SSID if your using what amounts to a user wifi router as AP, etc.. As to procedural help for you d-link switches.. Your going to be better off RTFM for your switch or via dlink forums, etc.  What is the make and model of these switches?  Maybe someone uses them. Here is a example drawing I did up for another user that PM about their network.. This should help as an overview. So in this example pfsense has 3 interfaces used on the "local" side of pfsense. Lan and VPN would be two layer 2 networks (vlans on the switch - not in pfsense) Where the switch would isolate this traffic but its not tagged.  While the wlan interface in this drawing has a native untagged network just like lan and vpn, it also does vlan tagging on that interface and handles your wifi tagged ssid based vlans. So in a wired network you can do tagged or untagged "vlans" with wifi your going to have to do tagging of the vlans.  This is can be confusing to new vlan users. In the example there are 2 switches, this can be expanded to as many switches as you have, etc.  The term "trunk" here reflects the cisco use of the term to man a port that carries tagged vlans.  The color coding of the ports reflects what the native vlan of that port is, etc. This is pretty good overall example of how in a very simple network how you could isolate different networks from each other some tagged and others untagged "vlans"  So in pfsense you would have setup of interface of wlan, and then on top of that physical interface you would create the "vlans" for your wifi networks. Hope that helps. In our PFSense , we just have to cards , LAN & WAN.under the LAN interface as the parent I have created a sub interface for the guest vlan, logically…. will this work or is it advisable to add one extra NIC card on the pfsense machine, and this extra NIC card i configure it to serve new Guest VLAN i intend to create

Thanks for the reply! I have used the official port off of the NUT website. It is the one that has no GUI.

There is a pre-made pfELK virtual machine you could try: https://www.reddit.com/r/PFSENSE/comments/4dymci/i_made_a_simple_bare_bones_simple_elk_vm_for/

thank you, it works ! good job :)

It sounds like I need to turn packet filtering back on and make some rules. Thanks…Jim