Thanks for everyone's help.  I found I had installed the smp kernel after all!  All I had to do was put the other processor in and I was good to go.  Confirmed everything was running with the top command.
FYI -  For a newb like me, I was  going to use cwadge's suggestion.  It seemed simpler for my skills to backup/reinstall and then restore.

THANKS AGAIN FOR A RESPONSE!!

Also another bone-headed thing:

I have two pfSense machines, one for manual failover. The plan is to dump the config onto it and swap the cables in case something happens to the primary.

But in the mean time I was messing with the secondary box, and had it plugged-in to the same WAN as the primary, and they both had the same CARP IPs on that interface. So I bet there was some bad interaction there.

So if I want to have the secondary box on that WAN connection I probably need to make sure there is no CARP.

I think this is related to slbd. I just realized I also made a change to the ICMP monitoring IPs for my gateway failover load balancing group. It was having trouble getting responses from the IPs I gave it during that change, and appears to really freak out about it.

I changed the monitoring IPs to the local IP of my cable modems and now the high CPU usage is gone.

This also is probably related to my "CARP related crash" thread:
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,12469.0.html

I've also seen messages about "no buffer space" when trying to ping from the pfSense console after messing with the gateway monitoring IPs. It's like it queues forever in a loop that can kill your box if it can't reach those monitoring IPs. That doesn't seem right…?

Snapshots hung up again maybe? No update in over 24h. Although I see some CVS commits maybe designed to fix this, so maybe I have to be patient…?  ;)

a dead post? hope not!

Today i found that access via web was dead and the webConfigurator wont start anymore so.. i decide to update to 1.2.1 from 1.2, looks like everything is ok.. webconfigurator works,VLANs and Loadbalance too (that's the primary job of this pfsense), i use the RC2 build from today [ 04-Nov-2008 12:41 39M ]

With a few post-install corrections, pfSense 1.2.1 works on ALIX with a hard disk drive.  Use a regular PC with a 40–>44 pin adapter to install pfSense selecting the "embedded kernel".  After the install is complete reboot and the restart off the CD a second time.  This time select option 8 to access a shell instead of install.

cd /tmp atacontrol list
  find your hard disk drive in the output above
  you will need it in the commands below
  should be something like ad0, ad2, ad4
  replace the "X" below with your drive number mount /dev/adX /mnt cp /mnt/boot/mbr . echo 'hw.ata.ata_dma_limit="4" ' >> /mnt/boot.loader vi /mnt/etc/fstab
  change the drive shown to /dev/ad0 instead of /dev/adX umount /mnt fdisk -B -b mbr adX
  (remember to replace the "X" with your drive number)

on embedded /tmp is a limited size, because it is a memory fs. the embedded image will not use more then 128MB.

I suggest making a full install to the CF instead.

You will need to manually replace the /etc/rc.firmware script with a decent copy from 1.2.
Then you can use normal upgrades again.

Alternatively just save the config and reinstall

Sounds like it's fixed. Thanks.

I just updated to latest snapshot (Fri Oct 31 12:36:04 EDT 2008),
and yes the fix is in and working.

Thanks a lot.

Nick.

Hi

Right now i'm using a Hitachi 30gb 2,5" drive on my alix 1.c. i had to use the hw.ata.ata_dma=0 switch. Before that i was trying to use a Seagate drive, but it would not work at all. everiting was working fine during install, but nothing would boot afterwards. seems that pfsense does not work well with the chf settings the alix bios passes.
greetings

Vortex

@Perry:

Hmm the first nic should be listed as vlan0
If I do ifconfig I get
vlan0: flags=8843 <up,broadcast,running,simplex,multicast>metric 0 mtu 1500
–->Lines deleted by me<----
vlan: 11 parent interface: em0

I setup pfsense to have 3 vlans on the LAN interface and used 10, 20 and 30 as vlan ID's

As you write this it can be wrongly interpreted. It's not called LAN interface but parent interface as a parent interface never should be assign.
Setting up vlans in console</up,broadcast,running,simplex,multicast>

Hi Perry,

Got it to work already. Turns out, I forgot to set the tagged port for each untagged port in the switch that I was using. It's all fine now from a vlan standpoint, and I'm having no problems with the vlans yet. I encountered an update problem with snort but this is for another topic. Thanks for the link by the way.

sicnarf

Rock on.

Next time I'm doing an install I'll be sure to try it with the USB stick connected.

Running Intel nics and a Dell server here.

The reboot happened after hitting apply after adding 30+ CARP IPs. Wonder if so many at once triggered something nasty?

Or if it is the wrong subnet thing, could there be a sanity check added to verify the subnet of the CARP ip against that of the interface?

I suspect that the system clock isn't getting synced to the hardware/bios clock periodically, which should happen as the two can drift apart.

On a Linux system, you would periodically call hwclock –systohc. Often this is called during shutdown/reboot as well.

Not sure if there is a FreeBSD equivalent.

Where exactly can I edit the files manually so I can remove the entries?