Intel module is more power e stable.

@wallabybob: What appears on the console (or the system log) when you plug the modem into the box? Sorry for the late reply, I just tested it a while ago. It says something like this: usbgen 1.3 (ZTE Corporation) connected on usbport 1 Also tried a ZTE MF627, same message. Apparently they're not supported :(

@wallabybob: Its a puzzling problem. I suggest you start a ping (with a large count) from same client to 8.8.8.8 and do a packet capture on the pfSense interface (to verify the ping is actually getting to pfSense). If you see the ping coming in to pfSense then do a packet capture on the "output" interface to verify the pfSense routing. If you see the pings going out the correct interface then the problem is probably outside pfSense. Is there a ping response coming in from 8.8.8.8? This did the trick Packetcapture showed some details, every single ping left from the pfsense, but none returned. Intel nic is all ok. 8) I'm having telewell EA501 as modem and it was as default settings, ports 1&2 routing and ports 3&4 bridging. Modem had ip-address of .55 which was outbound nat of this verstas verkko which didn't work. Now this demonish modem is all bridging and not generating problems. @Wallabybob, thank you very much, needed your help and time. So in the end i can only say, my bad not hardware. And i never thought to this be pfsense's problem.

Hi All Moving my question over here for it is a hardware problem: I have just got a x1250e and it is NOT booting at all, it is stuck on having the four center diag led on the mb constantly on, do not even do its first bip. See attached pic. Does anyone know where i can find a guide to what this leds mean? Have googled and googled but no luck. [image: 4led.jpg] [image: 4led.jpg_thumb]

undo what you did in windows and just change the setting to enable in the BIOS, see if that fixes it.

Well it must be a problem with the 6E1 boards and 1.2.3 because I got 5 new boards in today and tried them. They had 0.99h BIOS and IPSec failed to start just as the original board from cold boot. 2.0RC3 does not have this problem so I have decided to abandon 1.2.3 with my Alix boards (at least until I find that another model works) and just run 2.0.

I got it to work. A buddy at work (who informed me about pfSense) saw that once the new nics were added, they switched orders. The automatic detection of link status did not work, so we figured out the macs of each interface and got it up and work. One thing I am seeing on start up is this.. Is this normal? pcib2: <pci-pci bridge="">at device 2.0 on pci2 pci3: <pci bus="">on pcib2 fxp1: <intel 100="" 82558="" pro="" ethernet="">port 0x3000-0x301f mem 0xe0000000-0xe0000fff,0xc0300000-0xc03fffff irq 18 at device 4.0 on pci3 fxp1: Enabling Rx lock-up workaround</intel></pci></pci-pci>

@ptaylor: If you go to the trouble of trying to order one, it shows a shipping fee of over $60… to a US address??? Norhtec are based in Thailand.

See http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Accessing_modem_from_inside_firewall

well after many days of beating my head against the wall I discovered that my issues were related to on board nic cards. as soon as i installed the 2 pci nic cards, I was all up and running in 5 mins. I want to thank all that assisted me in resloving this issue. :)

There is quite a range of wireless NICs that work with pfSense, though not as big as the range of NICs which work with Linux. I have been interested only in wireless NICs that work as Access Points. I've had good results with PCI: TP-Link TL-WN651G USB: Tenda W311U and TP-Link TL-WN321G At this stage wireless "N" features are not supported though soma cards which are "N capable" are supported.

Thanks very much for the detailed clarification!  Makes perfect sense now. -MediocreFred.

You state 50 meg and 15 meg, but is that megabit or megabyte? There is a big difference and all too often they get mixed together and people usually don't clarify. Also is it two connections running at 50 and 15 respectively or is it one connection with 50 down and 15 up? Intel is always a good choice, can't usually go wrong with any Intel card. Broadcom is another good choice right behind Intel. If it's 50Mb/sec then a 10/100 card will do but if it's 50 MB/sec you need to step up to gigabit. If it's a P4 HT system it is most likely PCI based but might have some PCIe slots (definitely no PCI-X unless it is a server/workstation class machine which I doubt). PCI cards are getting harder to find for obvious reasons. As you search ebay don't be afraid to look at PCI-X listings, just make sure they are universal keyed and they will fit in a standard 5V PCI slot (working at the slower PCI speeds of course). See here for a picture description: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PCI_Keying.png. If you truly have a 50 MB/sec and 15 MB/sec connection (or a single 50/15 in MB format not Mb), then you need to consider an upgrade to some kind of PCIe or PCI-X card (and system to support it). The reason being, PCI is a shared bus (so is PCI-X but it has a LOT more bandwidth, PCIe isn't shared) and a single gigabit card operating at full tilt can almost saturate the entire PCI bus at 125 of 133 MB/s. That doesn't leave much room for any other PCI connected devices (even embedded devices) which could hog precious system bus bandwidth from your NIC(s) and thus slow down your internet speeds.

It's a home network and you want to run Xbox and streaming video over it? What on earth do you need gigabit NICs for unless you're going to try and make pfsense your switch too which isn't the best idea. The question you need to answer is "what is the speed of your internet connection?" That alone will determine what hardware you need and whether you really need that quad port gigabit card. That's what Cry Havok was asking, and I seriously doubt you have a 1 GB connection to the internet. Semantics here but even if you have a "1 GB" connection, a gigabit card will be the bottleneck as it is only 1 Gb which is further reason why I don't think you have an internet connection that can fully utilize a gigabit card let along a quad port card.

pfSense binaries are built for x86 systems (32-bit and 64-bit) and won't run on sparc systems.

Thanks for the info :(  Time to find another card.

Alright so I did a bit more testing. the pfsense lcdproc package doesn't include the driver i need, LIS.so So I uninstalled it, and manually installed the latest freebsd pkg from ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-8.1-release/All/lcdproc-0.5.3.tbz to my dismay, this also didn't include the lis.so driver (even though it should according to lcdproc's documentation) I did some more reading and it looks like the LIS driver needs libftdi to function properly, so I installed that from ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-8.1-release/All/libftdi-0.17.tbz I uninstalled and reinstalled the lcdproc freebsd pkg, and still no joy. it seems like just about nobody has tried to use this driver on freebsd/pfsense/monowall/freenas I did find an article on using this in MYTHTV: http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Nmedia_pro-lcd it looks like I might be able to get this running if i install from source (that way I can tell it which drivers to install, and force the LIS driver) but this is where im completely out of my element. Can someone please get me moving in that direction? I'd really appreciate it. My eyes are bleeding at this point. too much reading. The other thing that comes to mind - this is a driver that should be included in the pfsense package, but isn't. So perhaps there's some technical reason that this simply won't work on freeBSD/Pfsense?

Yes

Port the kernel patches, update the build scripts, setup your builder, and off you go. The nature of build systems, kernel patches and related, it's a very complex process if you aren't familiar with all those things. And changing base FreeBSD versions always creates additional fallout, which is why 2.0 is 8.1.