Thats true!

@stephenw10: Right but that would be just one PCI NIC moving data to or from the hist machine. If you have two NICs in a routing configuration on the same bus I would expect the throughput to be half that or less. What I could never pin down is whether it should actually be a quarter of the maximum bus speed due to having to send any return data. Looking back at my own results the box I used could only manage 200-250Mbps between two the PCI NICs. It seemed like it was a quarter bus speed.  :-\ Without some form of logic analyser it is probably difficult to determine average or typical DMA burst lengths on the bus. And the amount of "return data" including TCP ACKs is highly application dependent. I think in many cases a bit of analysis is useful to determine if a configuration is going to "work", rather than try to guess to the nearest 10Mbps the throughput that might be able to be achieved. In another topic still being discussed, the author is complaining of not getting Gigabit speeds between two interfaces. From additional information posted it looks as if the pfSense box is one of the generation where all the IO devices were hung on a single PCI bus or an ISA bus. The analysis shows there is no way to sustain 1Gbps between two NICs on the same PCI bus, let alone a bus also shared with disk controllers, ISA bridge etc.

Unless I'm missing something, most of the database work will be on another box, and there is no VPN here right? I wouldn't go with an LGA2011 CPU for that build. An i3 can push like 80mbps of VPN throughput, and can do wire speed gigabit routing. Ditto on the 32GB of ram as it's also overkill unless you're running PF inside of a VM on the same machine. You may also run into trouble with the RAID configuration as I know the ICH10 has trouble with AHCI unless you use the beta snapshot of Pfsense (or so I'm told). I'd put some of the extra cash towards more quality external access points and more PCIE slots on the motherboard side. EDIT: The 32GB of ram might not be the worst thing if you go crazy with Snort and Squid, but the LGA2011 still is overkill IMO.

Thanks for the reply. The machine does have the most recent bios installed. On the snapshot for Mar 4th it boots fine, thanks again

Yeah, I only ask because I have 10Gig capable pfSense units, but I don't have a 10Gig switch or servers to really test it. I hope one day we can do 10Gig routing and fully utilize the i3/i5/i7s and their Xeon variants.

Try it and see. However it's likely you can't because the Sonic boxes usually have a BIOS that will only boot a signed image. Also the BIOS itself is encrypted I seem to recall. Steve

Was unsure if Pfsense supported Intel's low voltage components. Removed HP's Bios wireless card whitelist…. Installed Atheros Mini PCI-E (AR5BXB63H/AR5007EG/AR2425) to be used as Access Point. Installed 2.1 Beta1 snapshot on HP Elitebook 2530p Laptop No problems ….. all functioning perfectly.

for us , we use Certain supermicro motherboards cause they use intel Nics and have a proven track record and stand behind there hardware… the packet of death on that particular intel nic was the vendors fault for a messed up EEPROM, but could happen to any Vendor... and whos gonna make it right if somethings wrong? that said , we still pay for the Systems we do and we have No problems with the hardware... and its with INTEL Nic's. NO Realtek junk

4 minutes!! Did you notice this board is not ITX but DTX? update: NOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!

Would you consider shipping it to an APO address?

Hi, Thank you for the feedback. I will look for a low profile card with Intel or Broadcom nics. I am a bit fixed on the i3, so I do not think I go for the Jetway board.

Hi, we have a "Telekom Speedstick LTE" (branded as Huawei E398). We tried to change the ID like you described in your thread, but weren't successfull. Is it possible to get help?

It should show up in dmesg as <none>. I don't think there is a FreeBSD driver for that card at all currently.  :( Steve</none>

@Zb1R: So what wireless chip could work properly?! I really want to add a wireless card too. See http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,59376.msg319147.html#msg319147 for a recent report from a reader who got a WiFi card working.

I am sorry for my poor english… the description is not very correct. In fact,  system was hanged ,  keyboard was not responsive(such as NUMLOCK), and screen was frozen. so  it did not prompt to submit a crash report. and I did not find any obvious message about this fault in system log. I had to press the RESET button, and disabled "Use Powerd" option in one minute.

depending on your hardware.. If the onboard LAN chip happens to be Realtek, save yourself some trouble in future and disable it in BIOS in advance. All sorts of mystic crap can happen with it. Also, Realteks really like to hog/strangle your systems CPU. Also disable sound and anything else you do not need. Use preferably cards from Intel, even if these are desktop cards and not server cards. Less issues. When your are using multiple cards on a PCI slots, make sure you are not exceeding PCI bus throughput (couple of PCI gigabit cards could achieve this). The throughput varies depending on bus speed and if the slots are 32bit or 64bit. Lowest value is 133Megabytes/s, highest 533. Generally 266Megabytes per sec. Older CPU-s might be too weak for handling high speed links, 1GHz+ recommended You got AMD X2 3800+. So it's either S939,AM2 or AM2+.. too bad. If you had s754 motherboard you could have bought S754 mobile Turion64 ML/MT from Ebay and use it, Turions often worked on desktop Nforce4 boards,they support 64bit and have power a plenty (comparable to P3M) while not eating too much power..(25W/35W max TDP).  One of the few possible options while trying for low-power system on old-tech.

:D Easy to overlook.  ;) Steve