lol…... wood for trees comes to mind. my blinkers were on well and truly there and i failed to spot that. reduced the dhcp range to 62 and away it went.
think i got caught out by the way pfsense displays the available range 0-63. may have been better if it said 1-62.
but, many thanks for your help as it was starting to do my head in! cheers.

@hugo:

I would like to be able to boot my pfSense off my USB key, read in the configuration file, and then copy everything to RAM so that I can remove the USB key.

Why? (If I had a bit more context I might be able to make a helpful comment.)

@hugo:

Obviously, I am not concerned about logging anything.

Why not? "No logging" severely limits your ability to find out what went wrong when something goes wrong! If you are anticipating having nothing ever go wrong good luck to you!

Ok thx alot for the answer!

Well.  I couldn't find any definitive information on the net, and none was forthcoming here, so I set up the standard 1.2.3-RC1 installation as described above.  /tmp and /var are on RAM disks, so it looks like writes to the CF card are minimized, at least.  And, it appears I still have VGA, should that be needed.  At any rate, it's working well (< 10% CPU @ 12Mb sustained download; < 20% with three active VPN sessions + streaming video), so I can live with it as is.  Still interested in the specific differences between the embedded image and standard install w/embedded kernel.

RH

thanks chaps, i'm now using the net with the PFsense box inplace.. good stuff..

I can tick that off the list of things to do now..

damn i feel stupid right now  ;D i forgot to check the BIOS-settings. PCI-Slots where OFF … i changed it to ON and it works like a charm infact im typeing this through my pfsense-firewall

thanks all! :)

yep…. back to basics. i'm gonna strip it back down tommorrow and see what happens.

You weren't being rude. I didn't take it that way. I was just being silly. It helps pass the time…

Okay I found this:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/network-wireless.html
But as my head is doing the bobb up and down thing from falling asleep at the keyboard I think I better get some shut eye.

Thank you Wallabybob

It's OK for 1.2.3  but captive portal have some pb ? CP is not active correctly

I will test with 1.2.3
I'll give you the result

Thanks

:)
Found the mistake.

I installed the HDD with a USB2IDE adapter. And this is a SCSI emulation.
The Nokia only kows about IDE, so i had to change the da0… to ad0...

-WOlfgang

Ok I guess thats the part I was not clear on. I thought generally you should be on the network you are configuring the rules/addresses for. If I can just build it "offline" so to speak on our old network I can definitely do it ahead of time. I was just worried that if it was not on the actualy network at the time I configured it, there would be issues. Thanks for everyone's input on this. Will report back on how it goes.

Bringing this thread back from the dead, I have switched to yet another system, copied all of the *.rrd files, and while the graphs appear with the old data, none of the new data is appearing in the graphs, including in the system graphs.  The system time is correct, so I'm not sure what's going on.

Edit: it would appear the period in which my system was offline, the logging was messed up.  Running updaterrd.sh manually produces:

ERROR: illegal attempt to update using time 1251689375 when last update time is 1251697276 (minimum one second step).

I believe I'm correct in assuming that just waiting a bit over two hours will cause the problem to solve itself?