Weird is that I can't get this fixed using:

hint.acpi.0.disabled=1

or

exec="unset acpi_load"

I have to check the bios settings again on a testmachine to be sure.

Still strange, I have the idea that I have to set another OS in the BIOS, this seems to help sometimes.

Almost immediately after posting this I thought to try booting with a different menu option.  Choosing option 2 "Boot freeBSD with ACPI disabled" worked a treat :)

Thanks for the correction. Can't believe I missed that. I will try it this weekend when i can reboot the box.

Rick

yeah i know

its just theres no option for keyboard and vga with the embedded dist. which makes it 100% useless for me.

If the embedded one had that option i would be using it.

@spookycave:

Thanks for the reply.  I had actually followed the instructions in that document, but I didn't get it to work in transparent mode.  After a lot of struggling, I figured out the problem.  When you're using a Cisco switch, you may need to disable spanning tree messages on one of your bridged ports, using the following subinterface command:
  spanning-tree bpdufilter enable

Basically this filters out any stp bpdu's that the port sees, preventing it from going into a "blocking" state once your bridge your LAN and WAN interfaces (or OPT and WAN as the case may be).  On your Cisco switch the problem will manifest itself with a solid amber amber LED on one of the bridged ports.  As soon as I issued the above command on one of the ports, transparent firewall mode magically started working.

Mike

Sorry for probably stupid question but would you need to set up transparent firewall if both LAN and WAN interfaces are located at the same vlan? How is firewall is supposed to work?

David,

The AT&F would only pop up if I plugged in the cable to a different port - so I think just a stray connection voltage would trigger it.

Late last night I ended up testing the one laptop I'd used to connect with pfsense with a second laptop, both running gtkterm (on Xubuntu) and the same serial cable (I'd checked all the pinouts against the 0-modem page link and it matched the other day, then rechecked the 2,3,5 per Eugene's last night and all ok).  Anyway, the two laptops connected via the same cable and using gtkterm on both worked fine.. all typing from one machine went to the second while the second would go to the first, I tried with both local echo on/off for both and both settings worked as expected without issue.

So I went back to pfsense with a verified working cable and software setup and still nothing (serial console on pfsense is on).  I pulled the video card and the machine wouldn't boot (checked BIOS for possible settings) - threw a BIOS beep.

I'm going to next try a couple of things… While I think I tried the Xon/Xoff you suggested, I'll recheck, then see if my Xubuntu 8.04 liveCD will boot on the machine (128MB) to run gtkterm and verify hardware (if not I'll try DSL, that has miniterm), probably a monowall liveCD, and if still nothing I'll set up a second pfsense box with two network cards.

yes.
just download the config and restore it.

I had the same problem with HP DL380. Fixed by disabling floppy-drive in BIOS. OS-type was set to 'other' as I did not dare to name BSD by Linux ;D so, I do not know whether it impacted booting process.

You must have downloaded a wrong ISO.  Download the iso from www.pfsense.org

Well tried to deploy it on a Poweredge 2950 this morning, couldn't login on the new web interface with a livecd run but it was with the REL1, guess I'll wait a bit.

you might want to check this site,

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/

although it is majority written for linux, but there is some
section devoted to the general BIOS/PC setup to
enable USB Boot.

Problem ended up being a faulty adapter card. Supplier sent me a replacement card and all is well.

It's been mentioned here before.  With unix you can delete a file that's open.  If you do that then while the file no longer appears in any directory listings, and isn't counted by "du", it still occupies disk space until the file is closed (at which point it is deleted).  There can be a problem with log files for certain applications when the log file is rotated but the application continues writing to it.  Eventually you run out of disk space, while not being able to tell why ;)

If you can identify the offending application a restart of that app will solve the problem.  In your case it was probably squid.

Thanks for your reply, I'm french, I found some Atheros card on ebay, not very expansive and fully compatible with Freebsd. I'll trie with this solution.

Thanks for the information. I will try and let know if it works fine.

@mevans336:

Even with 1:1 NAT, the firewall doesn't allow ports 0-65535 through right? It only forwards those ports through NAT?

Yes. That's true.
Even if you 1:1 NAT and you dont create a firewallrule that allows traffic, it will be blocked by the firewall.
I might have exaggerated with saying you expose ports to the internet with 1:1 NAT.
You have seperate rulesets for the Firewall and NAT.

But it's still a better approach to have 2 ways of security.
1: the firewall
2: no defined destination for inbound unwanted traffic.

It maybe won't fix the issue - but why are you using an obsolete Release Candidate? 1.2-RELEASE is available on the mirrors. There is one reason I can think of to start with RC3, which is if you have a system that won't boot with the uniprocessor kernel in 1.2-RC4 or 1.2-RELEASE, but you can still install 1.2-RC3 then upgrade to 1.2-RELEASE with the SMP kernel selected in that case.

It would certainly make sense to clear the configuration and start again. If that doesn't work, and the box is still responding to the console, select bridging again then reboot. Does it work then?