For posterity:

The problem ended up being the wireless card.

The Fit-PC2i has a Ralink wireless card taped to the motherboard where a PCI-E card would normally go, but it's connected to a small USB header. To even see it you have to completely disassemble the machine.

After getting underneath the motherboard I disconnected the USB wifi card and installed an Atheros card in the PCI-E slot. It booted up fine.

It's it's any help for debugging for devs, it was the RT2870  ver. 0.33 driver causing the crash. The wireless card was working fine in the current Gentoo installer kernel and current kernel.

I also had some problems at first with a USB NIC. Apple USB Ethernet Adapter for MacBook Air worked for me.

Would have to know what IP the crash reports came from to tell. The IP you're coming to the forum from doesn't have any.

A router is not a switch. Bridging interfaces tries to make it a switch but never succeeds.
This has been discussed in all possible (and quite some impossible) configurations already.

No, Jamerson, all the replies so far are trying to tell you that the CPU usage that pfsense reports in it's dashboard is NOT the CPU usage that is actually occurring.

Please find the graph of CPU usage in the Hypervisor itself, and check whether THAT is maxing out (or not).

How is your wireless configured?  Using an access point or a consumer router in router mode?

If the latter all wireless users will be "authenticated" after the first user logs in because they all appear to the captive portal as the same IP/MAC pair.

Solved!

I destined only 40 GiB to pfSense.

The system can't boot with the entire disk. However, with 2.2.4 version worked (?).

https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=24842.msg129059#msg129059

How wold your thermal sensors work in a VM?  Look to esxi for your thermal info on the hardware..  I don't think your system supports vt-d does it?

I have not needed to do anything with mbfu, nor any other sort of specific tuning.. Then again not running on your hardware..

For starters why would you be using e3000 with 35 devices..  Why not just use pfsense as your router.. You could leverage those e3000 as AP.. But I would suggest you get some real AP..  The unifi line is very budget friendly and properly place them around the office where best coverage is obtained.

You say you have esxi running pfsense - so connect 1 interface to your WAN and another to your LAN..  You have a managed switch, once you get some real AP you could break out your wifi to its own network sesgment.  Even multiple where you have wifi that is for employees and another for guest.  You could use a real form of auth for your employees like tied to your AD?  Or other form of eap so your using wpa-enterprise vs psk

Hey guys….

Got it finally working. Before install i plugged in both network cables one from my moden and the lan. Power cycled my modem. On boot the WAN adress was present this time. Assigned the LAN ip, subnet and range etc. No problem getting to the web GUI.

Thanks for all your feedback and posts.

This thread can be set to solved/ close  :)

How do you know it worked for 10-15 and you were not just getting something cached.

When you have a query that doesn't work - then follow it, its really pretty basic stuff.. You query AD server 192.168.1.100 for example.  If it doesn't have it cached it will walk the tree of roots down to the authoritative server for whatever domain your doing a query of..

Simple enough to sniff on the lan interface server is connected to and validate pfsense sees the queries to allow out to the network.. Look on the wan side, do you get anything back??

^ exactly your making it way too complicated..  It would take about 30 seconds to install the openvpn-as ubuntu package.. And prob less to install the app on your ios device.  Clickity Clickity your openvpn server is up and running..  Grab the openvpn connect client that works great on both ios and android devices and is FREE as in beer..

Your making it way way over complicated because you don't want to use the correct tool for the job..  Sure Bob I can drive that nail in with this screwdriver – see its real easy... ARrrrrrghhhhhh ;)

Click Click on vpn via my iphone, click click on a different profile using different port and tcp vs udp and even ipv6 access.

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Right, I am going for a record on the most times in which I can change my mind on what is wrong here. I think it was throwing me because it was intermittent but I thought it was corresponding to certain changes I was making.

To troubleshoot further I started from scratch and just kept rebooting over and again and I found that it was sometimes failing to come back up even before I had added additional interfaces to pfsense.

I eventually realised (I think) that it was because I was using legacy adaptors in hyperv - In the past pfsense had not worked for me unless I used legacy adaptors but maybe that has changed in the latest release.

Anyway, once I added standard adaptors it appears to be working as expected. I have WAN and 3 LAN networks now and it is allowing me into the web admin consistantly so I think and hope I have resolved the issue.

Just posting an update here in case anyone else runs into the same problem.

I think you are in the wrong section mate

You need to go here https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?board=21.0

Thought I should reply, I wiped the disk and installed from scratch again and it worked like a charm. It's unlikely I entered in the wrong login credentials (pretty certain I copied and pasted) but it is possible. Thanks for your assistance (:

same thing happen here. i try to boot from pfsense 2.2.5 usb 64 img that i prepare with physwritedisk. first i think that it's my hardware fault, but when i try opnsense 15.17.8 that has same boot loader option …same error show up.
i haven't try cd iso because i don't have cd...
the funny thing is when i try older version ( 2.0 and 1.8) everything run smoothly...

It seemed like the NIC was down. I'll check weather there are some other issues. Thanks!

Ok, thanks. I'll give it a go.