@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

Yes it can access internet but how it depends your config

@cmb: Yes you can. That means the host itself doesn't have Internet connectivity, usually missing DNS servers. Weird, I have DNS servers listed and am able to ping out using domain name instead of IP from the pfsense box and also from a computer sitting behind pfSense. Any other ideas what could be the issue?

ok, thank you guys again! will try to install latet RC and restore my config and tell you hows gone  :-\

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.