I have solved my problem by following this article:

http://mikepowells.net/tag/pfsense/

Basically, I purchased a CF Micro Drive that allowed me to install the full version on pfsense. I don't know how long the Micro Drive will last so I am building a custom box to replace the ALIX boards. I am using an ITX board with dual NICs and an additions PCI slot for a DMZ if needed. The total cost is $348 which I don't think is to bad.

Thanks for all the input.

Todd

Personally, I would not bother bridging multiple ethernet ports on my pfSense just to get a few ports in the same LAN subnet. You will probably end up with more LAN devices to connect (WiFi access point, NAS, cabled computers…) than you have ports in your pfSense box anyway, and will have to have a switch anyhow. It is easiest to connect a switch to the single LAN port on the pfSense, and connect everything else to the switch.
Then further down the track, if you want to have a separate guest network etc, you can easily use a spare ethernet port on your pfSense to make a separate subnet for guests and so on.

yup i have disable DHCP on dd-wrt and on the advanced routing tab i set it on router (default gateway)
on pfsense GUI the WAN connection and the LAN is up

The NTP issue has been discussed in other threads already, complete with a fix.

I have using an Asus M2N32SLI Deluxe with pfSense 2.0.1 AMD64  without any problem….

The 2 "nfe" onboard Gigabit Ethernet adapters was detected without any problem

It's specific to your hardware. Something in your BIOS or Motherboard, to be specific.

The 64-bit installer works fine on every bit of hardware, real or virtual, that we've thrown it at.

That said, there's not much compelling people to use 64-bit unless they have (and really need) more than 4GB of RAM.

there are more checks there in 2.1

Golden!

Indeed the gateway is working but somehow always offline in Status Gateway tab. I assume uplink provider blocks out pings.

But after disable state killing, it works for the time being until I fixed the gateway check.

Thank you very much for your time, make much more sense now! Really like PFsense.

So it works, you just don't see an entry for it in services? It runs, you can access it, and it shows installed, just no services entry?

That's really just a cosmetic thing and doesn't actually mean it isn't doing everything it should be, provided that it's actually running and gathering data.

Uninstalling the package and installing it again should fix that. Or try pressing the "xml" button at the end of the row for ntop's package and see if that brings it back.

@wallabybob:

Glad you got it working.

@CGTroll:

Now I'm stuck on VLAN setup.

I suggest you start a new topic for that and give a lot more detail.

@CGTroll:

know of a good tutorial on this subject? :)

I have found Wikipedia is often a good place to start looking for more information about a particular topic. You could also look at the pfSense documentation pages at http://doc.pfsensense.org for more specific pfSense information.

Will do! Thanks! :)

I've just come across your posting and would like to recommend following, hopefully helpful, links:
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,53401.msg285331.html#msg285331
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/serialconsole-setup.html

Peter

False alarm - I removed and replaced the rule that allowed me to ssh from the outside (limited to my networks!) and it works like it used to.

Boot the pfSense CD, then wipe the drives completely from the shell.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 BS=1M
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad1 BS=1M

Substitute the actual drive devices for ad0/ad1 (e.g. if they are SATA they could be ad4/ad6, etc), do "ls -l /dev/ad*" to see the drives if they are ATA/SATA, /dev/da* if they are SCSI

It's mostly going to be the RAID card and network card(s) that will give you the most trouble. Version 2.0.x is based on FreeBSD 8.1 while version 2.1 is based on FreeBSD 8.3. You'll have better luck for new driver support in 2.1. If you really want to get down and dirty, check the FreeBSD HCL and see if the device is supported. I can tell you this has come up before and the H200 RAID card is NOT supported in 2.0.x (FreeBSD 8.1) but is supported in 2.1 (FreeBSD 8.3). Do you know what RAID card and network cards you plan to configure it with?

Joel

Thanks, Phil.D, for the reassurance.  I've had some weird issues over the weeks that I can't always nail down and i'm just hunting for anything and everything that I don't recognize (… which is a lot!)  :-)

Thanks again.

I have this problem with the 4gb nanobsd-vga 2.0.3 image. I cannot get it to boot from USB. I have 3 identical Jetway JNF96 boards. All of them boot 2.0.2 fine. None of them will boot 2.0.3 either as a full install of 2.0.3 or an upgrade from 2.0.x. I get the same message as OP posted.  The system seems to enumerate the USB bus and crash. I can boot older versions and I can boot to SATA just fine.

When it crashed the keyboard is unresponsive and my only option is to reset/power down. What am I doing wrong. I built the image using phydiskwrite the same as 2.0.2. It starts to boot and then nothing.

(To help future folks struggling with this issue, I'm reposting this breadcrumb on the pages that are top hits for Google searches for this issue.)

It can take quite a bit longer than 5 minutes.  One of the maintainers (marcelloc) explains why in this thread:

http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=60095.0

Pfblocker uses url table alias lists published on local web server, if it tries to load alias from webserver that is not up, the fetch connections waits a lot (maybe your 5 minutes issue) before timeout.

More details are there.  The workaround is to make sure that the first boot doesn't invoke pfBlocker.  This can be done by uninstalling pfBlocker prior to backup, or removing pfBlocker parts of the config before restoring, or just waiting it out (sometimes 30 minutes or more).

1. Have you clicked the "+" button on the bottom of the Interfaces -> (assign) page to add the additional interface(s) to the pool of interfaces available to pfSense? If there is no "+" button see 2.

2. What version of pfSense are you using? MAYBE your on-board NIC is too new to be supported in the pfSense you are using. Please post the output of pfSense shell command```
pciconf -l -v