@central: When I boot without any media (CF/HD) connected the display shows a boot error message and menu options proving that the display does in fact work. When I boot from the CF card the display turns on, iIget one beep and the display then turns off…. Once the boot is complete and I'm faced with the console menu (like in wallabybob's post) the display turns back on but nothing is displayed. Hmm, well that's odd. The normal sequence for the LCD (if you haven't loaded the firebox LCD driver) is something like: Turn the box on: backlight comes on displays 'Watchguard Firebox' or something similar. Shows 'memory testing' followed by 'complete' Beeps and then shows 'Booting OS' (or boot error if the CF is wrong or missing) The display then remains the same, with the backlight on, as pfSense does not talk to it without additional drivers. Steve

Did not do a reinstall I did a fsck -t ufs /dev/ad0s1a and everything was clean but I still get a trying to mount from ufs:/dev/ad0s1a at the console screen and just hangs their.  But I am log into the web gui of pfsense and I am passing traffic through and making changes with no problem.  This is very weird.

@stephenw10: I'm not sure I follow what you have to type in. You can set the dns forwarder to resolve local hosts. In Services >> DNS Forwarder: you can set DHCP leases or static IPs to be resolved. You can also add dns records manually to point at internal servers. Steve I got it to work. In DNS forwarder i pointed my domain name to the ip address of my server so when I just type in localnet.me in the browser it takes me to my servers intranet wiki webpage. Just dont type in the hostname.

@jasonlitka: The drop is probably due to the latency of the extra hops to send all traffic through the VPN provider.  I lucked out in that sending traffic through Vypr only adds 6-8ms to my pings. I will build another pfsense box and try the vypr as well. Giagnews and vypr isnt a bad deal at all.

:) Thanks guys. I'll check it all out!

it looks like I was able to install pfsense 2.0 successfully.  Steps I took was run this command over night dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 bs=1M when I came home the console screen was frozen and could not use keyboard and it looked like the system was locked up. so when I rebooted I went to livecd or liveusb option and when I defined the wan and lan interfaces I just did option 99 to install on hard drive and everything installed successfully. Thank you everyone for your help.

blocking 80 and 443 to any is somewhat enough to block browsing totally

@amrogers3: Hi Wallabybob, thanks for the reply. Looks like I finally found the issue. The problem lies with a virtual interface utilized by VMware Fusion. Seems like a lot of people misconfigure their pfSense systems by configuring multiple interfaces with the same subnet. @amrogers3: I do have a question regarding EM0. I only have two interfaces EM1 which is WAN, and EM0 which is LAN. I have VLANs set up on EM0. I understand this may present a problem but can you go into more detail as to potential problems with VLANs on EM0? I know you said EM0 may "capture" packets without a VLAN tag but all traffic should have a VLAN tag. I am researching an additional NIC so I can move the VLANs from EM0. If all traffic on an interface has VLAN tags then there is no need to use the parent interface (in your case em0) as a pfSense interface. A concern I have in my own configuration is that if I have my LAN interface as a VLAN and my VLAN capable switch fails I'm not sure how I would reconfigure my pfSense. Consequently (and because there is plenty of spare bandwidth capacity on the interface) I have WAN and a DMZ as VLANs on the same physical interface. If I need to reconfigure because my VLAN switch has died I can still access my pfSense over the LAN interface. I suspect you would have plenty of spare capacity on the interface you are currently using as the WAN interface to support WAN and a number of your VLANs. I think one of the challenges on having tagged and untagged traffic on the same interface (or switch port) is that there is a potential ambiguity with equipment that doesn't support VLANs. Will such equipment ignore VLAN tags or discard traffic with VLAN tags?

It's been a while but I believe the current stable version of m0n0wall is based on FreeBSD 6.2 where as pfSense 2.0 is based on FreeBSD 8.1 (1.2.3 was  based on 7.2) so they are different. It's a bit tedious just to prove a point but you could try installing FreeBSD 8.1 just to check. So it's still hanging at the spinner, / ? Did you try the suggestions in the boot wiki page? I have seen this problem solved by using a smaller partition. Some others have successfully used a different boot loader. Personally I would try setting the harddrive values manually in the bios. This problem is probably caused by the bios passing the wrong values to the bootloader. Steve

Thank you. Will try this and post the feedback. Regards Kumar

Thank you ptt I tried a different version but used dd in my ubuntu box and tried the install. It halted again with messages about sectors in HDD again. Ran Danik's Boot and Nuke on the hdd and tried the usb boot followed by install. It is installed now but I am yet to make it sense my WAN Ip. Need to try different NICs. Will post findings here. Have another doubt which I am posting in a separate thread. Kumar

If you haven't resolved this yet you could try looking at: http://forum.ncix.com/archive/index.php/t-2348050.html http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,39094.0.html http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,39128.0.html It worked for me.

@goossen: I got this same issue and after spending two days trying to solve, changing hardware, etc. I unplugged the network cable and it worked like a charm! Gaaaaah, I've been pulling my hair out over this and it does indeed work. Thanks, Stuart

Does the crash always happen at the same place? That's an unusual place for it to crash, you might want to double check your RAM/HDD/PSU/Cooling/etc to rule out a hardware problem.

Thanks for the suggestions guys I got it working yesterday afternoon. It turns out I was including the LAN address in my range of LAN DHCP addresses. This was the cause of my troubles. So my LAN address was 192.168.1.1 but I used a DHCP range of 192.168.1.1 - 192.168.1.20. After changing it to 192.168.1.10 - 192.168.1.20 it worked.

Finally we've created a new partition, we put a full backup on it and we change rc.initial to mount the partition and restore from pendrive. It works well and we can install easily pfsense from pendrive with all packages and customized files. Regards.

Ok, so I stubbornly wanted to make this work, and did!  SO in case anyone else is struggling with the same board… I had to install from a SATA dvd-rom drive, the USB would just not work with this board for some reason.  Once installed, then if you have 4 nics (1 onboard, plus daughterboard w/ 3) then you also need to disable the parallel port on the integrated peripherals setting in the BIOS. If you don't, this gives you an irq 7 interrupt broadcast storm error when plugging into re3 (nic 3).  Once I did that, I finally got this to work!

ok, thanks for the feedback @jasonlitka