Thanks for your reply. I'll give that a try. Failing that I will just wipe it and start again. There are only a few rules and a basic configuration. My box has no optical drive though and reinstallation is a pain :(

hehe, great … thx i'll set up a BSD machine and try it!

What NICs are in it?  Do you have traffic shaping enabled?  Is it a particular type of traffic that acts slow? I have systems with similar CPU/RAM that handle 30MB/s perfectly fine.  All of them use Intel NICs.  Depending on what you are doing, you could be running low on RAM or states (can verify on the system status page).  For any system that has multiple users behind it, 1GB of RAM is a good minimum config.

The biggest challenge is to configure the ISA. I just forward the necessary ports to the internal LAN and block the rest. The ISA handles the website traffic and the PFsense handles all internal LAN traffic. Thereby securing the servers even more, bacause you need VPN access to get to the serverlan…

My thanks to both…  I'm replying while online with pfSense as I type. I didnt have an IP and I got one when I rebooted the modem!  But I had lost LAN function. In the process, I changed NIC's out and finally back in (to original); I removed all the extraneous cards (firewire, and sound); rearranged the order of the cards in the slots; tried new cabling; installed 1.2.3RC3 on the HD.... Do I dare put things back to the way they were???  I'm going to try... So I got proof-of-concept to work!  Now to put it in front of the entire network, not just the trimmed down version. Thanks again!

Well, the DNS blacklist can't work if it's not being used.  You need to configure the clients to use the pfSense server as their DNS server.

Yep you are right.  I just add two nics (do not pass through.) [image: pfSense_VMWare.png] [image: pfSense_VMWare.png_thumb] [image: Nic.png] [image: Nic.png_thumb]

Thanks!

Run /etc/rc.conf_mount_rw before you try to alter anything, and then /etc/rc.conf_mount_ro afterward. This will change the filesystem to read/write, and then back to read only. The GUI package system does this internally. The filesystem for NanoBSD runs read only all the time to prevent writes to the CF which could cause it to wear out.

Thats is bang on!  My sincere gratitude!  You dont know how much stress you have saved me! It works like a dream now! Thank you!!!

It's more of an issue with the iLO actually resetting during the OS bootup.  Go to HP's website and get a new BIOS to fix the problem. Specifically, you're looking for: Systems ROMPaq Firmware Upgrade for HP ProLiant ML310 G5/DL320 G5p Servers

@wallabybob: Have the looked at the installation screenshots at http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,7356.0.html? You can find links to quite a bit of documentation (including a link to the above screen shots) by following the documentation link from the pfSense home page: http://www.pfsense.org My recollection (its quite a few months since I last did an installation) is that you boot from the live CD, configure, then select menu item 99 (Install to hard drive) then when done, remove CD and reboot and then, if the installation went well, you will be running off the hard drive. The CD is designed so that you can try  pfSense running off the CD before writing anything to the hard drive. Thank you, that explanation helped alot…

I need to use only the squid and squidguard application for local proxy server so I only need one nic

There's a virtualisation forum with many posts in it that you should read. Key points: Virtualisation will always add a performance overhead - however you shouldn't notice it unless you'd be running the physical hardware at near 100%. Virtualisation introduces security risks since as well as vulnerabilities in the (now virtualised) host you now have vulnerabilities in the virtualisation platform.