ic thanks guys :D i think ill with with apu

I am also rocking a Intel I350-T2 over here, rock solid from the day of snapshot 2.1.

@FreeYourMind: Thanks for your reply. I am still uncertain about this, you are absolutely right a few firewall rules here and there won`t affect the performance of the ALIX system very much but if i throw squid + squidguard maybe clamav and snort into the mix i am concerned that the ALIX can handle all that with ease. I dont wanna overkill the whole thing and buying a A1SRi-2758F sounds a little bit overkilled considering the internet connection is only 6MBit but i dont have practical experience with the new ALIX appliances and the Relatek NICs won`t make the choice easier for me. Are they able to handle VLAN tagging properly? The old Alix boards and the new APU have nothing in common.  The new one will meet your needs, the old ones will not if you're using squid, snort, and ClamAV.

The bios doesn't have any fan setting but it may be possible to configure via the ipmi\BMC interface Added the 8GB but that cause a slight issue with the ATX power blocking the 4 dimm slot which may be an issue if i add a second disk for a RAID 1 set-up Replaced the PEG2BPI card with a Dell dual port nic which is seen as 2 Intel (R) Pro/100 Network Connections 7.3.8 The iso image didn't work with Rufus so i used the usb image and then the DD option Just looking at a Intel Xeon L3360 (Quad core 2.83Ghz 12MB L2 Cache) to max out the board

@dgcruiser: I was certainly leaning towards the C2758.  I've heard similar things about Rangeley in other places as well. So, I understand that FreeBSD and pfSense are always lagging behind on the latest and greatest hardware features, but would one of those Supermicro boards at least run pfSense, or is the hardware too new that it wouldn't run at all? Also, I read somewhere that a Marvel controller is used in these Supermicro Atom boards to help with the Quad GbE LAN ports.  Would that be an issue? Obviously, I'm hoping that the boards would at least run pfSense, and then just become more awesome as pfSense matures even more. I've got a SuperMicro C2758 at home and it works fine.  The NICs are Intel i354 with a Marvell PHY.

The TP-LINK TL-WDN4800 definitely won't work in 2.1.4. It should work in 2.2 snapshots though. https://wiki.freebsd.org/dev/ath_hal%284%29/HardwareSupport https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=70575.msg387318#msg387318 Steve

That number seems to be in dispute currently. Netgate/ESF published some numbers for their C2758 box but at least one member here has reported much better numbers.  :) I would not expect the C2558 to be much behind those, probably identical for firewall/NAT. If you run more than 4 heavy processes you might see if fall behind. Once 2.2 is out the 8 cores in the 2758 will puch it ahead. Steve

At this point 'readily available' for PCI wifi cards is going to mean 'commonly available on ebay'. You might consider using a PCI-miniPCI adapter since there appear to be many more miniPCI Atheros cards available. I second Bryan's point that wifi access points can be had very cheaply these days and offer a number of advantages. There are USB devices which work well. wikidevi is your friend here. Look for cards that feature an Atheros chipset AR5XXX 802.11B+G only. For example the TP-LINK TL-WN651G. Steve

Thank you for getting back to me so quickly!  I certainly appreciate your taking the time to help me out. That's comforting to know that the CPU has more than enough power to handle the throughput I'm looking for.  I wonder how fast it could go before I'd have to upgrade to an actively cooled, rack mounted option? As for the board, I'm hoping the Supermicro will work…I noticed in that bug report that most people were using consumer boards (ASRock, Gigabyte, etc) that were only aimed at supporting Windows and the like, but Supermicro is designed for servers and such so hopefully it has better support for FreeBSD based OS's?  I'm encouraged by the fact that the board that is mentioned in the "working" post is the exact same board I'm planning on using (he used the -L model which is a few bucks cheaper but loses some of the expandability, but it's the same board really). I followed the links in the bug report to an insightful post for FreeBSD in general.  It seems to be a problem more commonly seen with the Intel NUC boards using Baytrail-M, if I'm reading it correctly. I'll certainly keep it in mind, though, to make sure the vendor does returns if I end up going with it! Does anyone else have any input/suggestions?

What I meant was that with a normal AP you'd expect your client to be fast at 5/5 and get progressively slower until the signal drops at 0/5.  With the LR AP, the client still thinks it has a decent signal at 1-2/5 but most lack a transmitter powerful enough to get data back to the AP.  My example wasn't talking about absolute distance from the AP, but apparent signal strength on the client.

Thanks Steve. I shall try and experiment with whatever ESXi is now called before I buy a new box. I really appreciate the time you have taken to respond to my questions.

REVO South Africa dude??? @roccor: nah the new cabling alleviated that.  I'm rocking out with my **** out now!.

@jimp: … no, there is no way to do that on NanoBSD. You could mount the card on a FreeBSD box (or another pfSense box) and copy the config over, but for most it's easier to put the card in, boot it up, and then restore the config from the GUI. Could you please provide me with the location in the file system to copy the config.xml to? No modifications of the backup file necessary with and w/o RRD data?

Did you purchase the unit from Netgate? Or somewhere else? The Netgate APU firmware should have LED support, but I'm not sure if that's setup in a way that will work with either gwled or blinkled yet.

Nope, you shouldn't have to restart it ever (within reason!)  ;) What are the symptoms? Anything in the logs? (if you can reach them) What sort of traffic levels/types are you putting through the box? A common cause of the box stopping routing is running out of space in the routing table or some other state exhaustion. That can often be caused by torrent traffic or similar high connection numbers. Which interfaces are you using? I've never seen a problem after adding that one line to /boot/loader.conf.local but some other users have recommended disabling MSI globally. I've not seen any evidence that that helps and it removes the ability of anything alse to use it robbing the system of interrupts. Steve

Hmm, possibly some hardware fault then. Does the box boot anything else successfully? The original Watchguard OS? The FreeDOS image? Do you know the history of that box? Many of those original X-Core boxes have seen many hours in hot racks, my own X700 failed probably due to bad capacitors. Different to symptoms to your though. Steve

Hi Jimp Thanks a Lot for your help, this is the content of the ddb.txt file, if you can help me with this topic and save my job jeje db:0:kdb.enter.default>  run lockinfo db:1:lockinfo> show locks No such command db:1:locks>  show alllocks No such command db:1:alllocks>  show lockedvnods Locked vnodes db:0:kdb.enter.default>  show pcpu cpuid        = 1 dynamic pcpu = 0x56b7080 curthread    = 0xc6d948a0: pid 11 "idle: cpu1" curpcb      = 0xc6be9d80 fpcurthread  = none idlethread  = 0xc6d948a0: tid 100003 "idle: cpu1" APIC ID      = 1 currentldt  = 0x50 db:0:kdb.enter.default>  bt Tracing pid 11 tid 100003 td 0xc6d948a0 kdb_enter(c0f9278c,c0f9278c,c0fc6637,c15c9970,1,…) at kdb_enter+0x3b panic(c0fc6637,1,1,0,0,...) at panic+0x102 dblfault_handler() at dblfault_handler+0x9b --- trap 0x17, eip = 0xc0e6ebb8, esp = 0xc6be9008, ebp = 0xc6be9cf0 --- Xpage(0,c6be9d28,0,0,0,...) at Xpage fork_exit(c0ac2af0,0,c6be9d28) at fork_exit+0x87 fork_trampoline() at fork_trampoline+0x8 --- trap 0, eip = 0, esp = 0xc6be9d60, ebp = 0 --- db:0:kdb.enter.default>  ps   pid  ppid  pgrp  uid  state  wmesg    wchan    cmd 57550  1363 79000    0  RE      CPU 0              pfctl 42846 72549 79000    0  S      nanslp  0xc1550844 sleep 1363 79000 79000    0  S      wait    0xc8f44000 php 63696 75359 75359    0  S      nanslp  0xc1550844 php 63988    1 63988  1002  Ss      select  0xc877e8e4 dhcpd 72549    1 79000    0  S      wait    0xc8f42000 sh 5968    1  5855 65534  S      select  0xc877e324 dnsmasq 96801 85024 84448    62  S      sbwait  0xc830d254 initial thread 96547 85024 84448    62  S      sbwait  0xc8f65254 initial thread 96527 85024 84448    62  S      sbwait  0xc827b254 initial thread 96302 85024 84448    62  S      sbwait  0xc94173f0 initial thread 96140 85024 84448    62  S      sbwait  0xc827bd98 initial thread 41151    1 79000    0  S      piperd  0xc7bcc498 logger 41030    1 79000    0  S      bpf      0xc831d800 tcpdump 6630    1  6630    0  Ss      (threaded)          mpd4 100175                  S      select  0xc8348524 mpd4 45504    1 45504    0  Ss      select  0xc73334a4 racoon 92278 90346 92278    0  S+      ttyin    0xc6f2c470 sh 90346 90135 90346    0  S+      wait    0xc72d0560 sh 90275 37999 90275    0  Ss      (threaded)          sshlockout_pf 100137                  S      nanslp  0xc1550844 sshlockout_pf 100136                  S      piperd  0xc7386620 initial thread 90135    1 90135    0  Ss+    wait    0xc82d5000 login 87882 87577 87577    0  S      nanslp  0xc1550844 minicron 87577    1 87577    0  Ss      wait    0xc7a25ac0 minicron 87505 87187 87187    0  S      nanslp  0xc1550844 minicron 87215 86730 86730    0  S      nanslp  0xc1550844 minicron 87187    1 87187    0  Ss      wait    0xc8287ac0 minicron 86730    1 86730    0  Ss      wait    0xc8285560 minicron 86655 85024 84448    62  S      piperd  0xc8a91498 unlinkd 85024 84448 84448    62  S      kqread  0xc88e7d00 initial thread 84448    1 84448    0  Ss      wait    0xc82d5560 squid 39954    1 39954    0  Ss      nanslp  0xc1550844 cron 37999    1 37999    0  Ss      select  0xc853d824 syslogd 99107    1 99107    0  Ss      select  0xc853fbe4 ntpd 79000 74926 79000    0  Ss      wait    0xc738d2b0 initial thread 75359 74926 75359    0  Ss      wait    0xc8286560 initial thread 74926    1 74675    0  S      kqread  0xc8405200 lighttpd 68870 68742 68742    0  S      piperd  0xc7bcc000 rrdtool 68742    1 68742    0  Ss      select  0xc853e4a4 apinger 65178    1 65178    0  Ss      select  0xc7e3e1e4 inetd 11429    1 11429    0  Ss      (threaded)          sshlockout_pf 100115                  S      nanslp  0xc1550844 sshlockout_pf 100075                  S      uwait    0xc7333bc0 initial thread 11288    1 11288    0  Ss      select  0xc7e3f1e4 sshd   269    1  269    0  Ss      select  0xc7bae7e4 devd   260  258  258    0  S      kqread  0xc7a72900 check_reload_status   258    1  258    0  Ss      kqread  0xc7a72880 check_reload_status   66    0    0    0  SL      mdwait  0xc7328000 [md0]   37    0    0    0  SL      (threaded)          zfskern 100088                  D      l2arc_fe 0xc7510b04 [l2arc_feed_thread] 100087                  D      arc_recl 0xc750197c [arc_reclaim_thread]   24    0    0    0  SL      sdflush  0xc157f1e0 [softdepflush]   23    0    0    0  SL      vlruwt  0xc7300810 [vnlru]   22    0    0    0  SL      syncer  0xc15645b8 [syncer]   21    0    0    0  SL      psleep  0xc15642e8 [bufdaemon]   20    0    0    0  SL      pollid  0xc154fd7c [idlepoll]   19    0    0    0  SL      pgzero  0xc157fe94 [pagezero]   18    0    0    0  SL      psleep  0xc157fabc [vmdaemon]   17    0    0    0  SL      psleep  0xc157fa84 [pagedaemon]   16    0    0    0  SL      ccb_scan 0xc1518c54 [xpt_thrd]     9    0    0    0  SL      pftm    0xc050c170 [pfpurge]     8    0    0    0  SL      waiting_ 0xc156b9b8 [sctp_iterator]   15    0    0    0  SL      (threaded)          usb 100056                  D      -        0xc70f5d34 [usbus4] 100055                  D      -        0xc70f5d04 [usbus4] 100054                  D      -        0xc70f5cd4 [usbus4] 100053                  D      -        0xc70f5ca4 [usbus4] 100052                  D      -        0xc70dddac [usbus3] 100051                  D      -        0xc70ddd7c [usbus3] 100050                  D      -        0xc70ddd4c [usbus3] 100049                  D      -        0xc70ddd1c [usbus3] 100048                  D      -        0xc70cbdac [usbus2] 100047                  D      -        0xc70cbd7c [usbus2] 100046                  D      -        0xc70cbd4c [usbus2] 100045                  D      -        0xc70cbd1c [usbus2] 100044                  D      -        0xc70b5dac [usbus1] 100043                  D      -        0xc70b5d7c [usbus1] 100042                  D      -        0xc70b5d4c [usbus1] 100041                  D      -        0xc70b5d1c [usbus1] 100040                  D      -        0xc70a4dac [usbus0] 100039                  D      -        0xc70a4d7c [usbus0] 100038                  D      -        0xc70a4d4c [usbus0] 100037                  D      -        0xc70a4d1c [usbus0]     7    0    0    0  SL      aifthd  0xc6d93560 [aac0aif]   14    0    0    0  SL      -        0xc15506a4 [yarrow]     6    0    0    0  SL      crypto_r 0xc157e78c [crypto returns]     5    0    0    0  SL      crypto_w 0xc157e768 [crypto]     4    0    0    0  SL      -        0xc154de64 [g_down]     3    0    0    0  SL      -        0xc154de60 [g_up]     2    0    0    0  SL      -        0xc154de58 [g_event]   13    0    0    0  SL      (threaded)          ng_queue 100010                  D      sleep    0xc14ec5e0 [ng_queue1] 100009                  D      sleep    0xc14ec5e0 [ng_queue0]   12    0    0    0  WL      (threaded)          intr 100072                  I                          [swi1: netisr 1] 100060                  I                          [irq7: ppc0] 100059                  I                          [swi0: uart uart] 100058                  I                          [irq1: atkbd0] 100057                  I                          [irq14: ata0] 100036                  I                          [irq17: uhci0 ehci0] 100035                  I                          [irq16: bge0 rl0+] 100032                  I                          [irq25: vr0] 100031                  I                          [irq24: ste0] 100029                  I                          [irq19: aac0 uhci1+] 100028                  I                          [irq9: acpi0] 100027                  I                          [swi6: Giant taskq] 100025                  I                          [swi5: +] 100022                  I                          [swi2: cambio] 100018                  I                          [swi6: task queue] 100008                  I                          [swi3: vm] 100007                  I                          [swi4: clock] 100006                  I                          [swi4: clock] 100005                  I                          [swi1: netisr 0]   11    0    0    0  RL      (threaded)          idle 100004                  CanRun                      [idle: cpu0] 100003                  Run    CPU 1              [idle: cpu1]     1    0    1    0  SLs    wait    0xc6d92ac0 [init]   10    0    0    0  SL      audit_wo 0xc157eb80 [audit]     0    0    0    0  SLs    (threaded)          kernel 100086                  D      -        0xc7334400 [system_taskq_1] 100085                  D      -        0xc7334400 [system_taskq_0] 100034                  D      -        0xc7071740 [em0 txq] 100033                  D      -        0xc7071700 [em0 que] 100026                  D      -        0xc6ee6180

I used the gig realtek nics in a production environment for a long time with no issues.  They are not as bad as they were many years ago but the reputation they (deservedly) received has remained. If you can afford a supermicro board they are worth the price especially if this is for a work environment.  For a home network I would not stress about what board you use to much. I tried about a year ago to get wireless working with pfsense directly and had many issues so eventually I gave up.  I now use a ubiquity AP instead and it has been rock solid.  Worth the extra expense IMO. http://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ap/ http://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-Networks-UniFi-Enterprise-System/dp/B004XXMUCQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1405274434&sr=8-1&keywords=ubiquiti+uap

first of all you have to try to set up the definitive modem mode of your stick. It might be done using usbswitch software.