@GTX:

I can just get a 2.5 IDE drive and put it in without any adapters?

Sorry for the delay. Most of those boxes come with an IDE connector suitable for connecting a laptop style drive in a caddy. You will need an adapter to connect between the actual 2.5" IDE 44pin connector and the connector on the board.
It's mentioned here: https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/PfSense_on_Watchguard_Firebox#Further_Enhancements_3

Here's an example: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/253003464107

As I said before you definitely don't want to spend too much here because the 32bit hardware in that box has limited life at this point.

Thanks,
Steve

Something like the HP NC360T which can be had in the US market for $20 or so in slot PCIE_16_2 would do the trick.

That's an older PCIe x4 card designed for servers, and it has 2 ports driven by an Intel chipset.  Some other people on this board can recommend similar cards, perhaps ones that are available cheap in your region, but the main gist is that you can get an Intel server NIC with 2 or 4 ports pretty cheap on the used market.

I'd expect that you'd see significant benefit simply by using a second PCIe NIC rather than your current PCI one, no matter the chipset, but probably  not realize 1Gbps throughput until you get something with an Intel chipset.  The Realtek chipsets get a bad rap with FreeBSD and pfSense because the driver support is not on par with drivers for other operating systems, specifically Windows and Linux.

And finally, if your internet connection uses PPPoE for authentication, look specifically for a NIC that uses the 'em' driver for Intel chips.  The HP I mentioned above does, as do the PRO/1000 NICs (as far as I'm aware).  There is something about the 'em' driver that makes it perform better with PPPoE over the 'igb' driver that some of the newer Intel NICs use.

Hi, sorry for bringing up the old post, but i have tried usb modem ZTE MF-825A and it just works when i put it in, just use it as WAN and its done.

Are use a Dell R210,  with dual 1GB WAN  connections ,  my LAN  set up is all 10GB Fibre
The R210 handles it nicely,  You can pick up R210s online extremely cheap
Make sure you have the latest Dell BIOS,  and you'll barely hear the fans :-)

I  use a Dell R210II - Xeon - 12GB ram, 250SSD
With DUAL 1GB WAN  connections from two different providers
No issues whatsoever handles it like a breeze,

You can grab the R210's cheap

SSDs are so cheap now I wouldn't use in the other drive for any purpose.

I know this is an old post but I wanted to mention  I am using A Dell R210 II , Xeon/12GB Ram/250 GB SSD With the dual 1GB WAN  connections  From two different providers handles it with no problem,  We have 85 customers who back up to our location every night,  don't even notice them  when using the Internet / Network.

That's not a fault  …. It's a QOTOM "feature"  ;)

Mac  Phys port  BSD name ----------------------------- xx6F    1          igb0 xx70    4          igb1 xx71    2          igb2 xx72    3          igb3

That's the layout on my i5 , and a lot of other people reports the same "swap".
Now that you know it, you can just cable accordingly.

If it were linux you could swap the ifname vs mac-addr , i don't know if you can on FreeBSD.
But i don't see it as a problem , just a minor inconvenience.

/Bingo

It refers to whether or not the NIC hardware takes care of the VLAN encapsulation/decapsulation or not.
If it doesn't, the software has to examine all incoming packets, regardless of VLAN tag, to determine if it is relevant to the system, leading to higher CPU usage.
If you only have a couple of VLANs and moderate traffic loads, this setting is inconsequential, but if you are plugging into a 10-Gig trunk port with many VLANs each carrying lots of traffic, then yes, you'd want that.

A lot of sellers on Aliexpress, eBay and Amazon call their stuff "pfSense firewall" without our permission. A lot of them preload pfSense, which is also against our policies. Including Qotom and their Protectli reseller.

Is it OK (authorized) for the vendor to call it a "pfSense firewall"?

Not OK.

@messerchmidt:

E3 1220l v2 has more muscle, but uses more power. the later cpus use considerably less, but at a cost. I would go e3 1220, but up to you

Do you know e3 1220l v2 idle power usage? I searched but all I came across was E3 1220v1.. and it used around 17-25w depending on the motherboard. considering V2 is Ivy and 17w vs 20w. it should use bit lower. But I couldn't find actual data.

thanks,

Using a second storage device for a Squid cache is unsupported in the pfSense GUI but some users have done it.

You need to format the device at the CLI and mount it. You can edit the fstab to mount it at boot but that may get overwritten at upgrade for example.

You can choose the location for the Squid cache in the package so you can set it there once you have the additional storage mounted.

Steve

Dear all,

Thanks a lot for your replies.

In the meantime I found the bug… it seems all HP Enterprise PCs (I'm using at home) make a strange (weak) noise as soon as ethernet cards are built in and transferring data.

For testing I used various 1 to 4 port ethernet cards (I210-T1, I350-T2, I350-T4 variants) as well as the onboard NIC (Intel 82579LM). Whatever combination was used, there was a similar behaviour.
So I did the same with a second HP Enterprise PC, same story.

My conclusion for the moment is, that it seems normal for those HP PCs as none failed yet and that my ears are sensitive to this kind of weak noise ... by the way, the noise was much weaker than a typical whining dammaged chinese transformator (which you can hear from far).

Well I really hope my hypothesis will hold for a loooong while  ;)

Cheers chulio.

If you do choose to keep RAM disks, remember that you will lose everything saved to in on reboot.

You can select scheduled writes to disk in the settings for certain things.

This may or may not matter to you.

Although I closed the topic and fixed the problem with a windows saved backup image, I can only now say what the problem was and a big hole for others who may fall into it! The problem shows up as no LAN connection (red cross on network icon) or a slow to connect LAN. Sometimes the LAN will connect when Windows shows a yellow exclamation. The pfsense webgui works but there is no internet connection. The WAN connection on the dashboard can be in one of 2 states - WAN down red, or WAN up green but no remote IP address.  There is no problem with pfsense! Changing the pfsense configuration will drive you mad going around in circles!!

During the pfsense learning and experimenting period many things will get tried and tested - DHCP, fixed IP, DHCP server IP pool range, DNS server local or remote changes.  During these changes Windows keeps remembering everything in its DNS cache and the cache isn't emptied after windows reboots. My backup recovery of windows solved my problem because the previous DNS cache wasn't full of junk.

The answer is to use Wndows console to flush the local DNS. There are plenty of how tos, but this link has a nifty basic executeable you can plant on your desktop to flush frequently whilst setting up pfsense:

https://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/30136-dns-resolver-cache-flush-reset-windows.html