Please include stge driver in base system. After this procedure nic is up and recognized. stge0@pci0:0:14:0: class=0x020000 card=0x81801043 chip=0x102313f0 rev=0x41 hdr=0x00    class      = network    subclass   = ethernet stge0: flags=108843 <up,broadcast,running,simplex,multicast,ipfw_filter>metric 0 mtu 1500 options=8209b <rxcsum,txcsum,vlan_mtu,vlan_hwtagging,vlan_hwcsum,wol_magic,linkstate>ether 00:1d:60:5c:xx:yy inet 192.168.0.254 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.0.255 inet6 fe80::21d:60ff:fe5c:e576%stge0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2 nd6 options=3 <performnud,accept_rtadv>media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex,flag0,flag2>) status: active</full-duplex,flag0,flag2></performnud,accept_rtadv></rxcsum,txcsum,vlan_mtu,vlan_hwtagging,vlan_hwcsum,wol_magic,linkstate></up,broadcast,running,simplex,multicast,ipfw_filter> ~20 MBits/sec on my old P2 last pid: 51498;  load averages:  0.21,  0.10,  0.08                                                                            up 0+00:14:48  14:04:53 86 processes:  3 running, 70 sleeping, 13 waiting CPU: 12.1% user,  0.0% nice,  8.2% system, 27.6% interrupt, 52.1% idle Mem: 37M Active, 19M Inact, 36M Wired, 30M Buf, 111M Free Swap:  PID USERNAME  PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU COMMAND   10 root      171 ki31     0K     8K RUN     11:29 42.97% idle   11 root      -68    -     0K   112K WAIT     0:43 25.98% {irq11: fxp0}   11 root      -68    -     0K   112K RUN      0:36 21.97% {irq10: stge0}

I am using the Huawei E220 on the Alix 2d.13. It is working but only with 1Mbit/s. On my linux machine I get up to 5Mbit/s with the same modem.

A "smart" switch is probably what you are looking for. They can be had for well under US$400. They have some limitations over a full managed switch, but I find these limitations acceptable at 10% of the cost of the latter solution.

The smaller Watchguard boxes, the X10e X55e etc, are all ARM based and hence cannot run pfSense. The larger units (19" rack mount) are all more powerful the the Alix board by some margin. They all have fans and are quite loud as standard though there is some scope for quietening them down. Of the larger units only the X-peak box (X5000, X6000 and X8000) will work completely without any tweaking. They have 9 Intel NICs. They come with a 2.8GHz Pentium-4 and hence use a fair bit of power though it can be easily and cheaply swapped out. The X-e units (x550e, x750e, x1250e etc) have some great features and work very well. However they require a bios tweak to boot the CF card and current versions of pfSense have a buggy driver for 4 of the 8 interfaces that means they cannot be relied upon at high load. The other 4 NICs work perfectly though and newer versions of FreeBSD have fixed those bugs. Steve

have you already configured your raid setups?

@dreamslacker: The C version has been supported since pfSense 1.2.3.  The D should also be supported without issues (it's effectively a lower power C).  The ones that might have issues are the E revisions which include more changes than just a die shrink. E is working very well on my Jetway NC9C-550

Put pfSense back on the hardware (just swapped out a hot-swap drive) and did some similar tests between more modern machines than the problem workstations. Unsurprisingly, it cruises fairly well. Nice! Now I can start playing with some features that would be a bear to set up under plain old Arch.

I've got one myself and it's like Jason says, good for bandwidth up to about 80Mbit. Never had any stability issues over here and power consumption is low. I'm happy with it.  :D

@limecat: I dont know about prices etc in France, but a year ago I built two boxes for a client with the express purpose of a 100mbit site-to-site VPN, for around $500. I just did a custom build with AMD Phenom X3 processors, and they did just fine– it was probably overkill, as I wanted to be sure they could handle the traffic, and they did very easily.  Any modern AMD or intel processor should handle it easily. Thx for your feedback. We have about the same prices in france. At home i have a CoreI3 and it can do it without anyproblem (asrock vision 3D). However, i want a better solution and not leave the PC on 24/24. What kind of enclosure/case did you use ? Thx in advance, Jean.

Unless I am misreading your post, it is showing 148,000,000 bytes per second (AES192, which is what I will use due to the timing attacks on 256), which is 1gbit/s.  I was also assuming that the test only used a single core, so if I had 2 clients, I could possibly get 750mbit - 1gbit per client (possibly a little less due to losing turbo when using both cores).  Or am I wrong somewhere? Would you be willing / able to do an iPerf test over OpenVPN to test the real world performance? And either way, I was looking at crypto cards, and understand the VPN14x1 series to be in popular use.  Is that the one that is often recommended?  What about the Exar DX 1700 series?

@wallabybob: I suspect if you want something to handle several thousand pings in close succession then you may need a more capable CPU. However if want something that will handle predominantly file download traffic (with at worst, an occasional short ping flood) then the Alix is probably just fine. Thanks a lot for the answer, it has helped me a lot, looks like i'll have to go look for a larger CPU.

I'm currently using an Asus Hummingbird with pfSense and can confirm that VLAN is working.

@Cry: Those are chipsets that are listed, not card models. A quick Google tells me that the 8390MT uses the 82540 chipset. Thank you.

@tester_02: That's old hardware.   That setup always had issues with cd bootups (dvd's were new then). To narrow it down. 1.  Put a windows bootable cd in your system and see if it tries to boot.  Will prove your hardware. 2.  Put your burnt livecd on another system to prove the burnt cd/dvd. If both above work, then it's a hardware compatibility of pfsense with your hardware (guessing via chipset). Hi tester thxs for your kind input. I did that before entering the forum, my setup as a CD Writer not DVD , so i burned it in a CDrom compatible. Setup works fine with winxp i formatted yesterday and installed XP, running ok, the XP SP3 booted and installed sucessfully with no problems. Specs from motherboard Asus Motherboard A7V266-C separate graphic card running but it has a chip  VIA VT8233a i will test running the boot cd in another machine now..

Don't know why i coulnd find them, but thx for the links. After looking thru those i decided to go down to a desktop motherboard, a i5 2500k and 8 GB non ecc ram. Looking forward to getting things up and running on that :)

Not meaning to hijack this thread. Just wanted to pitch in to this great community. i3/i5 system is not going to suck up $20/month of power. More like $2 o r$2.5 (use PowerD !!) even if you keep hammering the router with 30+ users. That's about $24 to $25 a year. Still cheaper than the under powered Atom junk. I used an i3 system for 6 months and now using i5 with 8GB RAM since past 3 months.. Haven't noticed much of a change in my electric bill. Keeping in mind I have now close to 50 network hungry bulldog users, dual WAN 100/16Mbps (50/8Mbps each) internet, 4 VLANs and network is hogged up 80% or more 24/7. Also to add on top of that, I am running Snort on both WANs, HAVP, Squid, SquidGuard & LightSquid. All this is in a small Thermaltake enclosure. Of course you don't need or want this. But keep in mind that later on if you don't need pfSense to run on it, you can turn it into a full blown desktop or Hackintosh.

The FreeBSD hardware support list is useful but its not an exhaustive list. That is, there are supported devices which aren't on the list.

802.11n is not supported in FreeBSD 8.1 and hence not supported in pfSense 2.0. However there are a number of chipsets which support 802.11n which can be used in pfSense 2.0 in "802.11g compatibility" mode. I think you have two options: If you really want 802.11n features use a 802.11n capable external AP Use a 802.11g mini-PCI card "for now" and upgrade it to 802.11n card when pfSense supports it and you need the 802.11n features. I have read reports of Atheros 802.11n capable chipsets working with pfSense but can't provide any further information.