Found this: http://files.chi.pfsense.org/mirror/downloads/old/. It's the ServerGuru's mirror (found on the official pfsense mirrors page), they've got RC1 snapshots dated 2/28/2011 as well as several older releases into the 1.x range. Might be the closest you will get to an "official" source.

FYI- Use /boot/loader.conf.local - /boot/loader.conf will be altered during upgrades, custom changes will be lost.

issue was lack of ACPI  support, ultimately edited the config to boot without acpi.

could this not be an auto detect rather that defaulting to acpi?

As you said, the hardware is old and could easily fail at any time. Likewise it could keep working for the next 5+ years. Also as you said, it's cheap, a similar system and you could easily transplant drives or whatnot into the replacement. Or use the replacement for spare parts and rebuild the original.

An add-in controller (any el-cheapo RAID card can do mirroring, just have to make sure it's FreeBSD supported) would possibly be a good investment. It would let you move the array to another machine even if it wasn't exactly the same (barring an architecture change such as x86 to x64).

As for booting from USB it should be doable. Name brand servers are coming with internal USB/SD/CF ports for embedded VM installs for things like ESX/ESXi. If a USB flash disk can run an enterprise grade server like that it should be reliable enough for a firewall. I'd get a micro sized one (usually sold for laptop owners that don't want a large piece sticking out), this way you don't have to worry about something hitting it and snapping it off.

Not sure about booting from the CD and utilizing USB/HDD for config files. You've still got the USB/HDD to worry about just as if the whole OS were on it. And it seems like a hassle to restore a config file each time you reboot the firewall.

Looks like the RDP external protocol worked!!  Thanks for the help Urban!!

Onlyhisway

Yes, but so it the latest snapshot from July 8th.

If you aren't seeing updates from after July 4th, check the sticky post in the 2.0 board: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,38687.0.html

Many times need to use the "boot from USB" option at the first boot menu you see with USB CD/DVD drives.

It means that your WAN is trying to reach 192.168.1.1 on that interface, and it can't reach it because it can't contact it via ARP. Usually that maens that IP is not actually on that interface.

Perhaps you are using 192.168.1.1 as your LAN IP, and your gateway on WAN is also trying to be 192.168.1.1. If that is the case, one or the other would have to be renumbered to a completely different subnet.

You could try to take a photo of the point where pfsense stops starting on the laptop.
Perhaps someone could help you with that.

OK, admit to having my head in a rather dark place here,,!

Turns out I had been pressing F3, not just 3

I guess I am too used to the RHEL/CentOS console. I wonder if others are making the same error?

@UnEsxi:

(As my system has no way to do this in the BIOS and using an old cable does not achieve the same thing… )

There's no such thing as a Non-UDMA cable.  The difference between the 40 and 80 conductor cable is that the former supports up to UDMA-33 whereas the latter supports 66/100/133 modes.

Using the older cable still enables UDMA-33 mode; it does not downgrade the link to PIO mode.

So, next step?

Have to reinstall fresh image?  Wait for final 2.0 release and hope it's fixed?

I guess so. I'm running a full install with countryblock, bandwidthd, pfflowd and siproxd on a 1GB SSD.

@ionosphere:

can all settings of 1.2.3 be exported and imported to 2.0 without any problem? (my primary concern is the local user database for captive portal)

Yes. (Except the traffic shaper)

@ionosphere:

One of the reasons that I prefer 2.0 is multiple WANs. Can 1.2.3 handle more than 1 WAN? (plus load-balancing)

Yes.

I seem to be going through a similar problem – I get the same "Could not connect to the LDAP server. Please check your LDAP configuration." message -- see my post at http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,38257.0.html
When I run the test, it does connect and bring up some OUs and objects for me, as described in the link, but I'm stuck at either allowing all users in the domain to log in (by manually adding CN=Users to the Authentication containers) or none, as any other group I enter doesn't seem to work.

I note that you're trying to authenticate against an SBS – while I'm using a Windows 2003 standard server, the domain itself was created on an SBS 2000 server many moons ago but has since been migrated to non-SBS DCs.

I wonder if the issue is the AD/OU structure created by SBS being slightly different than a non-SBS-created AD, which the LDAP connector in pfSense in its current form doesn't know how to traverse properly.

UPDATE: See my post linked above for a workaround for filtering by group.