It's a feature of the RS-232 serial connector, if both ends have the exact same connector and pin configuration the wires  have to switched around to get it to work.

@submicron: http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Boot_Troubleshooting Tried that didn't work at all. But I installed pfsense on a usb-stick which is connected as a external hard drive… And guess what I can boot from the usb stick...

I've got a similar problem - except it's a 120GB disk that I've got lying around (my 2GB flash card has finally bitten the bullet after about 6 years!) The error I keep getting on installation attempts is: ,-<<< Executing '/sbin/fdisk -v -f /tmp/format.fdisk ad1' | ******* Working on device /dev/ad1 ******* | fdisk: WARNING line 1: number of cylinders (59130) may be out-of-range | (must be within 1-1024 for normal BIOS operation, unless the entire disl | is dedicated to FreeBSD) | fdisk: ERROR line 1: number of sectors must be within (1-63) '->>> Exit status: 1 I do want the entire disk available to FreeBSD (specifically Squid) if possible, but even going through the custom setup and using the suggested settings that produce a partition size of 7.16GB, it still fails on the next step. Any ideas?

Yeah that looks like a better boot, but not ideal. I know when the ALIX units hit that (#####) it means they needed a more up-to-date BIOS to boot the new images. Not sure if you'll be able to make that work on that old of a board or not. You might have to try this (but beware of the warnings) http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/NanoBSD_on_WRAP

dreamslacker, you are a champ. OK, I will install pfsense again to try it out. Cheers.

@gtivey: I might be wrong, but it seems that you cannot just dd the image in linux any longer…. Linux has absolutely no idea how to handle the FreeBSD glabels. Nor does it need to, you're simply dumping a disk image to disk. Though your Linux distro is apparently doing something it shouldn't be when simply running dd, and hosing the disk in the process. Which distro are you running?

Just for anyone searching for this topic in the future: Some CF cards flat out have issues.  If you experience issues try a different card and or CF writer.

@kc8apf: No, they are inconsistent.  As I said above, the initial command given to run is correct, but the command in the example output is wrong.  If you follow the example output, you end up with an non-bootable card. Ah yeah, fixed.

Yes I'm wanting to use pfsense just for wireless but it will be our own employees using our wireless(some guests who only need Internet) and they will need access to the local network. I am wanting to use pfsense mainly for the captive portal so that we can have them authenticate through radius to IAS on a server 2003 box to discourage them from giving out the wireless password for the employee network if we had a two ssid system (employee and guest). We do not want to do that, we would like to have it be one ssid and let pfsense decide where the traffic is routed. I am aware of the security concerns with this setup but this is one of the only free ways that I have seen to accomplish this. Is this possible with pfsense through firewall rules? I've had it set up before to where it was working sort of, users would get on the wireless on vlan 2, not be able to get Internet,but once they authenticated they could get Internet, bit they could not see the local network. My setup was exactly like my drawing above.

@tnine: If you write to a DOM, do you use the live CD or the embedded version? Either, depending on what version you want to run.

Thats FreeBSD installation. pfSense installation is different from FreeBSD installation. For pfSense installation go to the pfSense home page and follow the documentation link to the documentation Wiki and/or the Tutorials and you will see both Tutorials and Wiki articles on Installation (and other topics that are likely to be useful).

Ok.. SO ive managed to re-format my CF's back to their normal size, and after installing XP on a machine wrote int .img's to a few CF's.. but now.. when i plug in the bios update CF and power up i get this error: also when i plug in a pfsensenanobsd i get " Boot 1" and then a whole lot of ############### down the screen… any ideas? [image: 83598785.jpg]

Solved Need to upgrade de BIOS before installed on CF card

I've used a 1GB DOM for a couple of years without apparent problem. 2GB may not be enough if you are planning to use packages that are heavy disk users (e.g. squid). I suspect you could see filesystem problems if you get a powerfail while the configuration file is being updated. I have seen file system problems and configuration file corruption when pfSense 2.0 BETA was panicing when rum devices were enabled.