Currently wraps (266mhz) will push around 32 megabit.  So anything beyond a 500 mhz box with GOOD nics should be fine.

By GOOD I mean Intel or something as nice.

Good deal!  Glad its working.

I'll do the test next week if I can get my hands on a device with higher throughput than the soekris.
Thanks for the help.

Check our recommended vendors: http://pfsense.com/index.php?id=40

I just reset the resource configs, still cant see my network card :-(

PS: yea I know I have to instal freeradius on my own, that is not that hard, but sometimes SQL functionality freaks me out…. never installs as it should, although on RedHat installs are easy

OK - to answer my own question…

Based on this post [ http://m0n0.ch/wall/list/showmsg.php?id=73/62 ], I edited the /boot/loader.rc file on the ISO and added the following 2 lines to the very top:

set hw.ata.atapi_dma="0"
set hw.ata.ata_dma="0"

Then burned the ISO and booted - pfSense now loaded in PIO mode and everything worked fine.  The setting was retained during the install.

Question for the developers - Will the pfSense update process lose these changes or am I now good until I need to do a new full install?

For reference I used a trial of a program called UltraISO to edit the file.  You need to extract the file out of the iso, edit it, then paste it back in and save your new ISO.  http://www.ezbsystems.com/ultraiso/index.html

With "only" 40 mbit/s you won't push this device that hard that you'll notice a difference I think. Realteks put more load on the CPU than Intels but that shouldn't be noticable in your scenario and your bandwidth. You even should be able to go 100 mbit/s with this device (at least between 2 interfaces). I get full wirespeed with my C3 1 GHz with 2 Via Rhine nics.

Ah, so in order to do this, I'd have to have 4 nics in each server, 2 frontside, 2 backside.  Plus, those nics would have to support team failover on whatever OS they're using (mostly MacOS X Servers, and now I'm adding in about 10-11 FreeBSD servers).

Yay…that's a lot of nics.  Some of these boxes don't even have that many pci slots.  I know for fact that several of the on-board gigabit ports are supposed to replace the need for pci slots, so they only have 1-2 slots available.

Switch failover may be a lost cause in my environment.  I may just have to be ready with the swappable switch sitting there as a just-in-case measure. :(

Actually, upgrading to latest snapshot didn't solve the issue.

But i found a fix!

Basicaly these xseries spare an internal adaptec controller and a pci board with the ServeRAID controller.

That internal controller has no devices attached to it in my server.

Disabling the internal adaptec controller seem to chase that bad timeout..

Boot isn't delayed anymore after finding ipsd0 logical volume.

Well to answer my own question.
I was reading around on the freebsd mailing list and found that the message is the result of a known, but harmless, bug in dc(4). Since its not a show stopper I'll let it slide.

You may want to test a recent FreeBSD 6.1 beta and see if this an issue there as well while its still in the beta cycle.

Patches do not apply to 6.1.

Last update is 2004, this is not something we want in our codebase.

Check out the high-end pci-x and pci-e nexcom boxes.  I have a feeling you will want the dual xeon model.

:D

Thanks, thats fix it. Enabling and disabling polling with the web gui now works.

Thank you very much for the quick response.

1 have 1GHz P3 and 512 Mb RAM with Intel Server DualPort Server Cards and have 100MBit wirespeed performance