Thanks for the confirmation. I'm resigned to using an mSATA or plain SATA drive until Up^2 places nicely with FreeBSD. At least my eMMC wont get hammered with writes…  :-\

Ah!  ;) Good to know anyway, thanks. Steve

Yeah I agree with that. Have you seen our store?  ;D If you really want to run on battery you might be better off with a DC supply. It's generally significantly more efficient even if you need converters. I salute your use of blue LEDS though.  ;) Steve

I recommend setting powerd values to high-adaptive. It should fall back to the lowest frequency anyway but won't affect responsiveness like 'minimum' can. Steve

I think we need a diagram showing exactly how you have it setup. Otherwise any advise we give may be incorrect. Steve

Yes that's true. I would expect >300Mbps OpenVPN throughput with that CPU though. YMMV  ;) Steve

we have a new hardware now, and it seems to be up for two days without issues. I'll report backup either it crashes again. thank you for all your support

Or just do the simple thing and put the disk in a box that you can run the makers updater on.. Ie something with a display.. If your PCs not new enough to have msata interface, then pick up a card that adds.. They are on amazon for 10$..

For residential, bridge the ONU. Most of the time, their network management systems and support staff has no clue or option to deal with non-standard configurations. For business, if it's easy, you can register your endpoint most of the time and if it's fast and reliably, why not.

@stephenw10: I don't think I ever added it to the image. You can add it yourself though. It's here: https://sites.google.com/site/pfsensefirebox/home/XEBIOS_81.BIN Steve In the meanwhile I'm able to get it booting to the FREEDOSBIOS. And I was able to flash it and adjust the needed settings. Tried the next step to get PFsense to boot from the CF card, but that is still an issue for the moment. Many thanks already for your help guys!

This is a very reliable piece of hardware: https://www.gl-inet.com/mifi/ It handles 3G/LTE with MiniPCI-E modules which you can install on your own, based on what frequencies are at your location (pull one out from some laptop, for example). It's got two ethernet ports and also built-in WiFi, casing has reserved SMA mount hole for external antenna mounting if you want to (either buy on eBay or pull from a dated home router). It runs OpenWRT so you can do anyting with it: just bridge the LTE interface (QMI, USB Ethernet and PPP supported) with one of the Ethernet ports and plug that into pfSense. There's a battery and no-battery version of the device, so you can choose depedning on your needs. They say it's industrial grade, I confirm that because I'm using one since almost 1 year.

@NetworkGuy: Sounds like the pfSense interfaces aren't being assigned properly. 1.) The 2558F has an IPMI interface. On the IPMI "System Information" screen you should see a list of interfaces, BMC, LAN1, LAN2, etc. and the associated MAC addresses. 2.) HINT: The IPMI/BMC interface doesn't negotiate well with some switches and likes being nailed up to 100M Half Duplex if you have connectivity issues with IPMI. 3.) Assuming the 2558 and 2758 are similar, except for the CPU, LAN1 is the lower left port, LAN2 is the lower right, LAN3 upper left, LAN4 upper right. BMC (IPMI) is stacked over some USB ports. 4.) On the pfSense console, go to selection 8) Shell, and type: dmesg| grep igb 5.) Match the MAC addresses LAN1/igb0, LAN2/igb1, etc. 6.) Make sure pfSense, Supermicro and your fingers are assigning WAN and LAN interfaces appropriately Thanks, I solved this by updating the BIOS and cleared the CMOS on the A1SRM-2558F, here's more information since I opened a thread in Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/PFSENSE/comments/6y0m39/supermicro_a1srm2558f_not_issuing_ips_from_lans/

Hard to say what the reason is right now. That driver is not the newest but if there was a known issue with it I would expect to see bug reports…. There is a slightly newer version available from Intel. Or a significantly newer version in FreeBSD 11.1. You can try importing 1.4.12 into pfSense. A better test might be to try loading a FreeBSD 11.1 iso which has 1.7.12. Steve

Well the processor you need would be determined entirely by whatever bandwidth you might be able to get wherever you are. If you want to use two mPCIe modems both slow will require SIM card sockets and wiring which limits your choices massively. In fact I'm not sure I've ever seen one. You might have to use a adapter card that provides the additional SIM socket. Do you need wifi also? Also using mPCIe? Steve

1. Can the ZTE hotspot just be connected via USB to the PFSENSE and it will detect it? I can't speak to the 920 but the ZTE 917 Falcon (T-Mobile) can be plugged in via USB and it "just works" showing up as a USB (ue) interface.

I don't think this is your problem but having just built a box using HP's 4 port version of the I340 I can tell you that you will want to add this to /boot/loader.conf.local to prevent kernel panics under load: hw.igb.num_queues="1"

That card should be supported by re(4) and has been for some time. Installing drivers is not something you would generally do in pfSense. Check the boot log for error messages from the driver: cat /var/log/dmesg.boot Check the IDs reported by the device if no driver is attaching to it. Look for devices on type noneX with class 'network': pciconf -lv Steve

….. aaaaaand nevermind, I must have a faulty port on the switch. I forgot to do the one last permutation of plugging LAN into the other port. Ignore this post

@chpalmer: @sleb: Is an external access point somehow more preferable to another card inside? Yes. An external AP is independent from the driver support in BSD. You can place it on an optimal spot in the building instead of having it there the computer "lives". And depending on the AP you may have better range too

@belt9: used 8GB sticks would be perfect for you if you think you might be using TLD on a lot of lists. You are building a very high end system anyways, so might as well not skimp on the RAM quantity. I was thinking the same lol.