There is more information on the Alix boards at http://www.pcengines.ch/alix.htm There are variants with 2 or 3 NICs on board and 1 or more mini PCI slots and wireless mini-PCI adapters.

If you have a VLAN capable switch you could get by with 1 NIC running multiple VLANs. In the last few months there have been a few posts on VLANs with suggestions for economical VLAN capable switches.

Typically FreeBSD is very good at auto-negotiation.  I know I thought I had a mis-configuration before and it turned out to be the T-1 router from our Telco.  You can give this a go, but know that it's risky.

http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,9434.0.html

dude,

That custom 2u case is sweet!!!  You should do a write up so others can copy the idea.

-V

Is your power supply capable of supplying the current needed by the dual NIC PCI card?

Maybe the box was built to a price (or size) and consequently the power supply doesn't have much margin.

Send an email with the output you pasted here and the output of a pciconf -lv and send it to freebsd-net@freebsd.org plus freebsd-stable@freebsd.org so the driver author can give you a propper answer.
Usually it is an id issue which is a simple adding the id to the driver and recompile but better confirm with the driver author.

@atamido:

Do you plan on converting the existing power supply to fanless, or are you going to purchase a new fanless power supply?

I may have to replace the power supply with a fanless model.  The entire PC doesn't need alot of power to run so I can probably get away with a small factor 100 watt PS unit once I change the hard drive to a CF or laptop hard drive and no fans.  I'd very happy if the entire thing runs under 20 watts but not likely due to the PIII.  Lucky it's not a P4, power hungry little beast.

Darkk

Thanks for the information! The article re SonicWall is crazy. I love open source :-)

Having received no feedback, I went on and bought the motherboard anyway. The good news is that the onboard Ethernet is recognized and there seem to be no other problems. I haven't tried to really use it yet, though.

@Cry:

Suggestion: Use the search function ;)

Recommendations for choice of NIC have been made many times.  Intel Server grade cards are amongst the most recommended ISTR.

Sure I have already read some posts about intel. I want just to be sure that intel and dell 830/840 are compatible.

Thanks for your interest!

Well, I have found a decent workaround for now.

adding:

<shellcmd>ifconfig sis1 media 10baseT/UTP mediaopt full-duplex</shellcmd>

to the system area of my config.xml seems to have done the trick.

Thank you guys for all your answers!
Unfortunately we have come to the conclusion that pfSense is not mature enough for enterprise use in our company. I'm not saying it can't be used that way, but make it running on new enterprise hardware seems to be bothersome. Together with some other small, and less small issues, we decided to switch back to a hardware firewall; a cheaper and in our eyes more reliable solution which is less risky.
Maybe we get back on this decision some day, but for now it seems the best choice.

If you purchase a short-depth 1u server, you could always mount one on the front and one on the back of the rack.

Hmrf,

I gave pfSense 1.2.1 RC2 a shot.
My Intel Pro Gt 1000 was detected just fine as an em0 device, but the internal VIA gigabit nic was detected but NOT enabled:

vge0: <via networking="" gigabit="" ethernet="">port 0xf800-0xf8ff mem 0xfdffe000-0xfdffe0ff irq 18 at device 14.0 on pci0
vge0: MII read timed out
vge0: failed to start MII autopoll
vge0: MII without any phy!
device_attach: vge0 attach returned 6

So, what to do next?

PS: Filled a ticket: http://cvstrac.pfsense.org/tktview?tn=1834</via>

As you're running squid I would really push you to stay away from any CF full installation as the continuous writing/rewriting of the cache will fry a CF in no time (at least according to many other posts here).  Glad you've chosen SSD over CF.