Please read the hardware sizing guide and other threads on this forum. Whether an Atom works for you will depend significantly on what bandwidth and packets per second (PPS) you're trying to push.  Sizing for snort depends on how you configure snort - it's easy to configure it so that it uses 100% of a 3 GHz CPU, or none of one.

Please read the Hardware Sizing guide, found one click from the pfSense home page and search this forum.  There are many threads on sizing and there's little point in re-hashing them ;) 51-200 Mbps - No less than 1.0 GHz CPU 201-500 Mbps - server class hardware with PCI-X or PCI-e network adapters, or newer desktop hardware with PCI-e network adapters. No less than 2.0 GHz CPU. That rules out both your choices (BTW, did you read the product description page for that first one?  The one where it clearly says it can't push more than 85 Mb/s?). Two key things to note: You'll never achieve 100% bandwidth usage.  If you need 200 Mb/s of throughput you'll either need to aggregate 3 x 100 Mb/s ports, or use a Gbit port. Packets per second usually matters more than raw bandwidth usage (more details in previous posts).

@joebobfrank: It may be a really long time before FreeBSD can be installed on it so I'm going to install Debian. There are reports that FreeBSD already runs on the Guruplug's close cousin, the Sheeva: http://plugcomputer.org/plugwiki/index.php/FreeBSD_9.x_%289-current%29_Plug_Computer_Distribution

I'm running a via VB8001 board in 3 different applications, Pfsense being one of them. My current uptime is about 400 days, or the last time the power was out for an extended duration. Is it a quad core processor running multiple apps or windows pulling 400 watts? No, but it draws 14 watts and handles our connectivity just fine. As someone else posted earlier, check your thermals or power supply.

good luck and check with them to make sure your not supposed to do any thing special like adjust any power settings (which I don't think you would have to do any thing like that on the headers like SATA or IDE right?) I had an IDE DOM that melted for some unknown reason…

ok I know the one I got most likely won't work (plus i picked it up used anyways) do I guess its time to tear into it and explore it…hehe...see what it has...

I have found the problem. I have been debugging the switch and the router when i thought "fuckit" and i removed all the network kabels from the switch and placed it next to the router and i used a different cable nd it worked like a charm. I took my cabletester and noticed that my cable was faulty. So much debugging for a 5-10min fix. But thanks for all the help, i have learned alot these days.

In that case, please see my previous answer ;)

I hadn't tried one of the nano images, I've now tried - pfSense-1.2.3-RELEASE-1g-nanobsd.img.gz and can report that this works 100% on the motherboard, I suspect it must have been some odd incompatibility with the ethernet drivers ?

Try running the following command in an elevated Command Prompt for Win7/ 2k8: netsh int tcp set global rss=enabled autotuninglevel=experimental congestionprovider=ctcp netdma=enabled

True, the funky method was not as necessary on the SSD as it was the DOM, but I like the idea of it staying off the SSD and keeping everything in memory :)

Thanks, and if I get approval to purchase this I will post results

Sure thing-good luck

I was looking at that.. but that uses laptop ddr2 dims… I dont have any spare of those... I am looking for ddr2 for desktop dims.

Hi. Thank you for quick reply…. Well my motherboard doesn't support USB boot... but my question is that does pfSense work from USB boot? I am willing to get a new processor since right now I'm running on pentium4 and HDD which consume seems to consume soo much power. there is a bundle for amd+mobo for 65 and I can use everything from my old computer since CF card and IDE cable goes about ~30.00. Just need confirmation before i dump the 65 dollars!

I can see you are trying to get everyone to agree with you or talk you into pfSense as the God product of all time, but that's not going to happen.  They each have their strengths. That's really not it at all. I've been trying to determine those strengths you mentioned! You pretty well summed it up there, just perfectly: pfsense -> firewall untangle -> UTM It sounds like both dabble around in each others respective territories a bit, but both are better in their own area. Now I know that I can get a little more into the pfsense stuff. Untangle probably seems to me to be more hardware intensive because UTM is naturally more hardware intensive than firewall. Makes perfect sense. So now I'm curious what exactly falls into the realm of firewall and what falls into the realm of UTM. My original post intentions sum up to: router/gateway QoS vpn blocking nasties (content filtering) blocking ads (also content filtering?) IM logging virus scanning/intrusion prevention Which of these things should I be doing with pfsense, which with untangle? tr3

Search for forum for duplex. There are a few threads about it. You have to add a custom option to the config to make it happen, there isn't a place in the GUI for it.

You can output the console menu on multiple ttys, but due to how USB works you might need to send a HUP to init (kill -HUP 1) to reload ttys after the boot process is complete since I bet the usb serial device does not exist when the file is first loaded. You might be able to use a <shellcmd>/bin/kill -HUP 1</shellcmd> at the end of the config before to make it happen. Also make sure you are referencing the correct device name for the usb serial port. The serial port device names have changed fairly often over the years.

Before I wrote the post, I read the manual sometimes, because to make it work properly the FX5622 with nanoBSD have to do a diferent number of changes. For example: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,17786.0.html http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,21194.0.html etc, etc… One SATA II disk with 1TB in 2.5'' is a very new hardware!!! I think it's a lot of space!! I would like to know if somebody have this pfsense model with this configuration and if works fine. Thanks!

edit ignore, my question was answered