Generally the snapshots are "good enough" but there are sometimes problems with particular snapshots or certain features of particular snapshots.

Steve, thank you very much for the feedback. I was pulling my hair out! I purchase a new heatsink/fan so we will see how that works out. Cheers!

I removed that picture since it was basically making your post a spam post. If you want to list the model you used and link to the source, that's fine, but try not to turn the post into one large ad for another company.

There are quite a few others that have used thin clients for pfSense before. They can be very good, provided you can stuff an extra NIC or two in them (or use VLANs)

Little update on the topic few months later ^^ (Quite busy past weeks)

Finally I got a Supermicro 1U with included PSU for 90$

I've modified the case a little bit since the Nic did not fit well with the adapter I found, made new holes, moved the mobo, painted the case and hooked up everything.

Note: Supermicro chassis have a 1piece connector for front buttons & led that dont fit with desktop motherboards, had to figure out wich part of the plug controlled power&reset then simply put the connector sideways to get theses switch working. (adapter available on supermicro website)

Installed everything yesterday as basic setup, added pfBlock and snort today ;D

See pictures below.

I just ordered a 12inches quiet fan and I will remove the blower, open up the psu remove its little fan also and let the psu open in the case. Then I'll put the quiet fan in push configuration above the mobo and remove the shitty middle wall. Currently the setup is 26Db at 3feet, hope it will help

Thank you all

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Maybe I did understand MSIX wrong. Though it's probably usefull with a quadcore or more.

I'll have a look at the FreeBSD page about em and try to tune the settings.

Thanks.

just a FYI,
macs can DD iso's directly, no need to convert.
actually some images are made unbootable when converting. (obviously not true in this case, but i've had it happen in the past)

Just as FreeBSD is updated.. so as their supported drivers. Realtek as late as 2010 worked great with pfSense 2.0 beta. They were problematic with the earlier versions of pfSense coz they had little to no support for drivers. Its not the same anymore. I have built well over 15 systems for family and friends since 2010 and a lot of them have Realtek cards. Till date none have shown an forms of issues.

I in fact have issues with Intel on VMware. One can argue on VMware drivers.. but my take is.. it's more on the NIC chipset.

I have had unreliable results running from USB also.  I switched to either the full install with a hard drive or a CF card. CF card is rock solid.

thank you for your reply.

Much easier with the right tool.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/diy-tools/dp/B00439KMC0

Steve

@kejianshi:

For wireless AP I go with a DDWRT linksys E2000.  They can be had for dirt cheap, its always been solid for me, all the ports are gigabit, so you also end up with a 5 port gigabit wired router.  I've been running them for years.  They also make excellent portable clients to your pfsense VPN if you have one.

This:
I use a WRT610N (basically the same as E2000 and E3000) with DD-WRT, now is a powerful managed switch + access-point with multiple SSID and VLAN..

Thanks..
Unfortunately to late, I just ordered without N technoly so I was sure it was working… (I really do not have the need for N).

I used to use CA10: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,40502.msg209156.html#msg209156

I had it booting from a IDE DOM (http://goo.gl/HbWpV) running the full version. I never had any problems, though booting was't fast and upgrading took forever.

@newbieuser1234:

How did you flash the DOM with nanobsd?

DOMs usually have flash with many more write cycles than consumer grade flash intended for cameras, phones etc. Therefore you can run the full version of pfSense on them. I have run my home pfSense from the same 1GB DOM for over 4 years.

If you want to run NanoBSD why pay extra for a DOM when a cheap CF card would do?

But if you really want to run the nanoBSD version off a DOM then the flash procedure would be essentially the same as for a CF except you would need to connect the DOM to the motherboard on the appropriate socket (SATA or IDE) for the DOM and take care that you specify the destination device correctly. The exact details will depend a bit on what equipment you have available for flashing the DOM.

Ah well that's a different matter then.
When is this happening? Is there anything in the logs?

Steve

Hi,

I finally managed to fix this problem by disabling the onboard sound, and reducing the memory allocated to the video board.
This thin client seems to be running pretty well and the only real problem was getting the intel dual lan card to fit into the riser card as the card had a full height bracket (A quick cut with the  hack saw fixed that)

Thanks for looking

Richard

Makes sense, but to be honest, not sure if you guys have seen the prices lately, a lot of HQ rack servers out there for cheap, I'll probably stick with the processors and get a smaller 32GB ram version per your advise (I know it's probably still overkill), you can easily get one of these for a couple of hundred bucks.

Besides, I'll probably run some sort of IPS so since everybody's saying it's gonna use up a lot of CPU, I guess I'd rather be safe than sorry.

For the switches I guess the Cisco 2960 looks good. Might try that myself and prices are ok. Though I have to ask, how come you're not able to get 100 mbps over 100 mbps link if your server is under utilized? What's the bottleneck holding it back?