@radiosilence: It has no CD Drive. If your laptop will boot from a USB drive and you can access a USB CD drive you could probably install from the USB CD drive. Alternatively, put your laptop hard drive in another system which can boot from a CD drive and install there, then move the hard drive back to the laptop. There will probably be a couple of minor tweaks required after moving the drive. @radiosilence: It only has one Ethernet port. If your gigabit switch supports VLANs and the laptop ethernet supports VLANs you could use the switch as a port multiplier to provide multiple "virtual" interfaces to pfSense. @radiosilence: Is it worth my time? It has 512MB RAM, an Intel Pentium M 1Ghz CPU. It'll be serving four or so users + some on wifi and I want to do things like QoS and traffic reporting/controlling like this: http://i.imgur.com/cXi0t.png (not sure what module that is though). The CPU and memory are probably more than adequate.

Somehow solved : my reseller just told the that the IDE > Sata converter force the HD to be set as master. As the CF cannot be seen as a slave, I just can't do this way.

Problem solved. The problem was the jumper of the hard disk (WD4000). The jumper was set for master with slave but it is alone disk so I changed it and voilá. :)

Hi, i was just waiting and doing nothing. The install continued then. No idea why. Best, Friedemann

now it support it with a bios update.

ok, after much digging I have found the problem. The problem is VMWare Server 2.0 does not support bridging vlan frames to a virtual interface. If that's what you want you are going to us VMWare ESX and configure a vSwitch to handle that. Since I'm a cheap son-of-a-b*tch and want to use the free version of VMWare I have to configure my vlan interfaces on the host os and let the host handle the tagging. Then create the host os vlan interfaces as bridged interfaces on the guest. So no vlans run native on the guest (pfsense). This is all referenced here: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,9292.0.html I did not use the e1000 interface as VMWare claims (in the web config interface) that this is known to cause problems on BSD. I have no idea of the validity of this but I seem to be working ok without it. Cheers and thanks to all on IRC for chiming in on this.

ALIX http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Tutorials Use the tutorial for the WRAP

I have removed the Intel Gigabit PCI-X card and installed an Intel Gigabit PCI-E (PT) card. I am still unable to download at 100 mbps while uploading at 100mbps.

You only use the same subnet on interfaces if they're bridged.

On 2.0 you can use the "Set interface(s) IP address" console option, and since you can't get on LAN, you might also find this useful: Start a shell, and type in: pfSsh.php playback enableallowallwan Once you get in you can setup proper rules and lock it back down.

I tried with empty service name, still the same issue… ppp log below Oct 12 19:19:00 ppp: [wan_link0] Link: reconnection attempt 12 in 4 seconds Oct 12 19:19:04 ppp: [wan_link0] Link: reconnection attempt 12 Oct 12 19:19:04 ppp: [wan_link0] PPPoE: Connecting to '' Oct 12 19:19:04 ppp: PPPoE: rec'd ACNAME "NH" Oct 12 19:19:13 ppp: [wan_link0] PPPoE connection timeout after 9 seconds Oct 12 19:19:13 ppp: [wan_link0] Link: DOWN event Oct 12 19:19:13 ppp: [wan_link0] LCP: Down event Oct 12 19:19:13 ppp: [wan_link0] Link: reconnection attempt 13 in 1 seconds Oct 12 19:19:14 ppp: [wan_link0] Link: reconnection attempt 13 Oct 12 19:19:14 ppp: [wan_link0] PPPoE: Connecting to '' Oct 12 19:19:14 ppp: PPPoE: rec'd ACNAME "NH" Oct 12 19:19:23 ppp: [wan_link0] PPPoE connection timeout after 9 seconds Oct 12 19:19:23 ppp: [wan_link0] Link: DOWN event Oct 12 19:19:23 ppp: [wan_link0] LCP: Down event Oct 12 19:19:23 ppp: [wan_link0] Link: reconnection attempt 14 in 1 seconds Oct 12 19:19:24 ppp: [wan_link0] Link: reconnection attempt 14 Oct 12 19:19:24 ppp: [wan_link0] PPPoE: Connecting to '*' Oct 12 19:19:24 ppp: PPPoE: rec'd ACNAME "NH"

You might need to tell us exactly what settings you have in the PPPoE configuration fields for your WAN (except password and first part of the username of course, we don't need to know that) The contents of /var/etc/mpd*.conf may also be helpful. In particular, I'm wondering where the name "nkyx-kent" bit in the log came from. If you have the service name field filled in with that, try erasing it.

Thank you!! Shame on me. I set it to 115200/8/N/1 to enter the bios because it was the default settings of the FW-7530. I set the "Serial Port Mode" to "9600/8/N/1" and "Redirection after BIOS POST" to "Boo Loader" and everything is working. Thank you for this fast and helpful reply. Problem solved Thank you, Michael

And is the netmask and default gateway set exactly as provided by the ISP?

That's how most home setups work, there's nothing special about your configuration. Plug the pfSense WAN port into the Internet connect, plug a switch into the LAN connection (and the PCs into the switch).  Configure pfSense to suit and away you go.

Thank you again Wallabybob. Your reply makes it clear for me, and also made a "penny drop"… Previously I had read the details about minimum specs/sizing at: http://www.pfsense.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=52&Itemid=49 .. but I did not really understand the throughput considerations. Now with your description I suddenly "get it". I will go with idea2 and monitor it as you say. If my cpu shows too much load, obviously I can move to faster hardware. Otherwise, I should be all ok up to peak 200MB/s :very happy: