I run a double NAT configuration: pfSense 1.2.3 downstream of a Zyxel ADSL modem. I've tried a couple of times to get the modem into bridge mode to avoid double NAT but haven't been able to get PPPoE to work. I did have some problems with VOIP soft phones but was able to resolve them by careful software selection. Sometimes I run "triple NAT": a test pfSense box downstream of the production pfSense box. Everything works pretty well for me but I don't have a wide range of applications and protocols in use (pretty much basic home use: mostly gaming, web browsing and email with occasional FTP).

Does the pfSense host get a WAN IP from your ISP?  Did you power cycle your ISP's modem? Can you please post, as wallabybob has asked twice already, the output of ifconfig -a.

@wallabybob: That's not the embedded version. It should show boot progress on the monitor. What is on the screen after you boot? Is this the same problem as the similar one you posted in the hardware forum? Its often considered poor form to post the same problem in two different places. There are other people who have posted their experiences with the SuperMicro X7SPA-HF It might be worthwhile searching the forums for X7SPA and seeing what turns up. Someone else may have solved your problem. I connected another monitor and what do ya know, it worked. I have no idea why. I can't explain it. Knoppix and an untangle install worked but some some reason pfSense didn't like the monitor I was using. Bizarre. Anyway, thanks for the help, just glad I am able to install it now  ;D

Forget it all. Everything works fine now. Turns out one of my PFsense devices was glitchy. Reinstalled from scratch and restored the information and it worked fine. I wish there was a way to find out what made it so buggy.

we ended up updating the old slave to 1.2.3-Release then taking a backup of it and dumping it onto the new kit. Made new2 the master and then backed up the the old master, restored it onto the new master checked and we had a working cluster again. Many thanks

You're right on the minimum RAM requirements, which won't help. I'd guess it's probably a hardware fault, but you really need to view the console when it crashes to find out.

@sandman06: hi there could you explain how you ran the install of pfsense from usb http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,28264.0.html

@amrogers3: Thanks for the reply. I apologize I am new at this and trying to learn. How did you get the md5 hash of the .md5 file?  ??? How do I compare the checksum of the .iso.gz to that of the .iso.gz.md5? I did take the md5 of both files and compared them, I know that is wrong. Calculate the MD5 of the iso.gz file. Open the .iso.gz.md5 file in a text editor (e.g. Notepad), compare the contents to the calculated MD5 of the iso.gz file.

You'd need a MIPS compatible version of pfSense for that.  There is some very early work underway, but from what I can tell it's a long way off.

I would look at the newer model X7SPE-HF-D525 with the Atom 1.8GHz processor and DDR3 memory support.

Correct, the behavior of CARP failover has not changed in that regard between 1.2.x and 2.0

http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Boot_Troubleshooting set kern.cam.boot_delay=10000 boot This worked for me. One problem I had when originally troubleshooting, escaping to the loader prompt, setting a value, and rebooting was probably because I'm pretty sure I was entering the command reboot which as far as I could tell was erasing my changes and completely powering off and rebooting. The above documentation referred to the "boot" command which didn't do this and kept the changes I had made and worked.

Usually that means that the router itself is unable to resolve DNS or route properly via its default gateway.

Thanks guys for your help!  Very appreciated!  I guess I'll read some of the documentation about IP addresses….

we also had issues with 1.2.3 after an upgrade (weird packetloss, backup pfsense having part of it's carp interfaces in MASTER status), so we stepped back to 1.2.2.

Nice!

@radiosilence: It has no CD Drive. If your laptop will boot from a USB drive and you can access a USB CD drive you could probably install from the USB CD drive. Alternatively, put your laptop hard drive in another system which can boot from a CD drive and install there, then move the hard drive back to the laptop. There will probably be a couple of minor tweaks required after moving the drive. @radiosilence: It only has one Ethernet port. If your gigabit switch supports VLANs and the laptop ethernet supports VLANs you could use the switch as a port multiplier to provide multiple "virtual" interfaces to pfSense. @radiosilence: Is it worth my time? It has 512MB RAM, an Intel Pentium M 1Ghz CPU. It'll be serving four or so users + some on wifi and I want to do things like QoS and traffic reporting/controlling like this: http://i.imgur.com/cXi0t.png (not sure what module that is though). The CPU and memory are probably more than adequate.

Somehow solved : my reseller just told the that the IDE > Sata converter force the HD to be set as master. As the CF cannot be seen as a slave, I just can't do this way.

Problem solved. The problem was the jumper of the hard disk (WD4000). The jumper was set for master with slave but it is alone disk so I changed it and voilá. :)