Lots of info on snort in the packages forum.http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/board,15.0.html

Yeah I tried that too.  What i ended up doing was putting the hard drive in my work (dell vostro) pc, installed from there then moved the hard drive back to the original computer. Thanks for the help.

I've managed to fix the errors and all is working well now! I plan on setting up a test with some different traffic patterns to see if the watchdog errors come back again.

I would try to install it with a normal PC that have two IDE port and then boot the CF into your Atom board. This might work, although I didn't test this myself. pfSense install all the drivers even if you don't have the hardware, the purpose of this is probably to allow you to add hardware to your router without having to reinstall. I prefer to sacrefice some MB to have all drivers onboard than having to reinstall pfSense everytime I have to add a NIC that use a different drive than the ones I had at the initial installation. I just read on those Atom board, you should have SATA ports, get a cheap SATA CDROM and problem solved, but make sure the BIOS can detect SATA CDROM, most new BIOS can, but just be sure before ordering a new hardware. MageMinds

My first attempt last December had similar issues…  I moved my NIC's around and it worked after that.

Hopefully pfSense 1.2.1 won't be too far away. Only the developers can speak for sure, but I believe the image I posted the link to is regarded as production grade - albeit to be used only if your hardware requires a later OS than FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE. It's pfSense 1.2-RELEASE built on top of FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE rather than 6.2-RELEASE. It's working well in production here, as I said - current uptime is 28.5 days.

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.