Absolutly stay away from cards with this chipset as on the X540. You wont reach more then 2Gbit/s Troughput on them, and nothing will help except installing ESXi on the host and then pfsense on top. I made my head out with that cards with days trying to debug slow troughput with pfsense trying everything i could find, consulting with people on the pfsense ircchannel and alot more.

we finally fixed the issue by replacing the x540 cards with cards that have a qlogic chipset.

Thanks for all help. Cheers

Are these enough to support Gigabit WAN? What speeds are expected over OpenVPN?

Realistically you would need 2 USB nics for wan and lan unless you use vlan switch which at that point you have created more of a mess….

Incidentally this is an HP laptop.

Can anyone help with this please.. ? been reading other post but it just seem to go around in circles :)

It's the mSATA drive which is an Intel 120GB SSD installed by PfSense when unit was purchased. Replaced it with an old 120GB laptop hard drive, reinstalled the OS, then restored the backup. So far everything seems to be working great so far.

What's lousy is that the unit was still in warranty when this all started. By the time i was able to troubleshoot and figure things out, the warranty has since expired. What's interesting is that the Intel SSD has a five year warranty.

One thing that, from my perspective, which is not fair, to get the image file, one has to pay for support or pay $19.00 for a thumb drive to be sent. Yes, $19.00 is not the end of the world, but waiting even a day to receive the thumb drive is not an option. This has to be up and running now. Since the updates are free, then why can't the image file be free if one can prove ownership of a PfSense device?

I have several of these deployed and they get about 980 mbit on WAN

A1SRi-2758F SuperMicro

http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/1U/5018/SYS-5018A-FTN4.cfm

Your status does say newbie so depending on your purpose for hardware …..for a company I suggest looking at pfSense (Purpose built) hardware....

You are both correct and a much smaller carbon footprint for our future generations. Lol

I hadn't considered just replacing the CPU, but I would prefer to upgrade the motherboard as well.  Most of my NICs are currently PCI.  Plus I'm getting a good deal on the i5.

Other than cost, do you think there's a downside to moving to the i5?

It is supported but with caveats:

https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ral

No other drivers that I'm aware of, the manufacturer RaLink doesn't offer any FreeBSD drivers of their own as far as I know.

I would instead go for an external AP such as one of the entry level models from Ubiquiti:

https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ap-ac-lite/
https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ap-ac-lr/

If it won't boot a 64MB card it's probably not written the image correctly to the card. You might try zeroing out the card first:
https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Writing_Disk_Images#Cleaning_The_Target_Disk_.28optional.2C_but_recommended.29

Did it boot the FreeDOS image the one time it did boot? Or the original OS?

Steve

The pocket wifi shows as usb ethernet device. When I reboot pfsense, it won't boot due to "network interface mismatch", because it checks before the usb items show up in the console. I had to add "ue" to the list of interface types to skip in "is_interface_mismatch()" function of /etc/inc/util.inc.

This wasn't a problem in pfsense 2.3, but appears to be a problem now on 2.4

hyperthreading effectively doubles your registers and halves your cache. whether that's a net win is entirely workload dependent. in the best case your latency and throughput will both increase.

I thought I saw one for sale on ebay with pfSense mentioned - hence I used it as an example. Will need to check.

Thanks for the response. I'll wait until official 2.4 is out and hopefully all is good.