I wouldn't bet on it being in a 2.1.1

Thank you very much for your reply, I just ordered one  ;D

@SixXxShooTeR:

Any UPS you recommend for home use?

I use these, plus the remote monitoring cards.  I like them because of the Sine Wave output.

http://www.apc.com/products/resource/include/techspec_index.cfm?base_sku=SMT1500

If you're looking for something cheaper then APC's Back-UPS Pro line is nice.

Ok, the 7.3.8 driver looks like it does still support the 82546GB. I had forgotten that the driver was divided into two some time ago (in 2011?), the legacy em driver code still lists it. So maybe just adding the PCI device ID to the current driver would allow it to run without the by-pass hardware.

Steve

Further…

I enabled powerd and "minimum" mode, and my CPU speed dropped from 2GHz to 125Mhz!  CPU use with a single Netflix stream went to 100%, then 27%....

This is interesting.  My temps are 12C lower already, and it will be interesting to see if network traffic (Netflix) is effected as the CPU scales.

As long as the family doesn't lose its precious internet, I can run this system as slowly as possible.

ETA temps went from 70-75 to 53-55C with no noticeable network performance hit.

Note that this is a PCI-X card, so it won't actually fit into modern PCIe-based mainboards.

Hmm. IPv6 issue perhaps?
Doesn't ecplain why it's only broken on the X700. Some hardware off-loading not working with the Realtek NICs?

Steve

@stephenw10:

Reading some blog and forum posts, possibly that modem needs atd instead of atdt to dial. No idea how you'd change that but maybe you could test it from the command line.

Steve

Thanks, I did wonder if it was something like that.

I'll try that from the PPP term.

@Raegis:

Another thing I would like to ask is if pfsense supports the usage of modem cards and if yes if there are ones known to be working especially well?

Since you're based in Europe, it should be easy to get hold of old/ cheap Thomson Speedtouch modems.  The ST516v6 or ST536v6 are compact (small) units that should work well.  You can even put them inside the computer chassis so they don't occupy more space.  Open up a PCI bracket and run the power, tel. & ethernet cable in.

A little more info on the subject, just in case this issue affects someone else in the future. There were two misconfigurations in the LAN that led to this:

I had two DHCP servers on the same subnet assigning IPs from the same pool.

I had one of the servers (192.168.1.7) with a dual NIC with Adaptive Load Balancing enabled BUT without a primary NIC selected for the team, which made it swap MACs between ports constantly. pfSense did not like this.

Once the first issue was addressed the second issue kicked in and the log was flooded with the following (at a rate of about once per second).

kernel: arp: 192.168.1.7 moved from a0:36:9f:07:70:61 to a0:36:9f:07:70:60 on em4
kernel: arp: 192.168.1.7 moved from a0:36:9f:07:70:60 to a0:36:9f:07:70:61 on em4

with regards to the watchdog timer, thread here but i cannot reply http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=43844.0

according to -> http://lwn.net/Articles/342308/

its a derivative of the IXP2000 linux driver

Thanks for the tipp. I made it working by manually patching it. Maybe this is something for the development team to consider to try out your trick…

Just uninstalled/reinstalled and it seems to be working. :-)

Thanks,

Steve

Ah, ok. Well if it's that old it may not been locked down.
Might still be a suitable candidate for m0n0wall or OpenWRT (x86). Probably only as an interesting project though.

Steve

@gonzopancho:

Interesting, but gaining an IP address via DHCP isn't going to have a measurable effect.

Also, you may want to note that I won't let Netgate (or ESF) release results based on a direct RJ45 connection. 
While it might represent decreased variance between test runs, it doesn't represent real-world conditions.

The point I was making is that 50 Mbit is pretty much as fast as an alix can be trusted to go.
It could do a lower maximum if you're running lots of packages and crypto.

Also by using a direct ethernet, takes out any limitations imposed by the internet connection, my home VDSL gets 40/7 so I can't use that to find an upper limit for throughput.

In my city there is a new fibre network that is available at speeds of 30 or 100 Mbit, so an alix 2 would be fine for the 30 Mbit plan but not really up to the 100 Mbit plan.

The whole point was to find a ceiling value.

In other testing, we've found that a cisco 88x series router tops out at around 30 Mbit maximum, so they're really rather useless.  This is handy information to have when scoping realistic hardware requirements.

By comparison, the local telco put in cisco 1800 or 1900 on anything up to 3 Mbit then Cisco 2900 on up to 30 Mbit.  They're not cheap.

If you require fine-print, these results are mine, and may or may not reflect your actual experience. YMMV.  If symptoms persist then see a doctor or registered medical professional.  May contain traces of nuts.  And don't ever trust Tower Insurance.

yes, we fully expect to support this in pfSense 2.2 (which is based on FreeBSD 10).