My first thought as well, but I've tried every conceivable permutation to no avail.  I do suspect hardware issues though.  It's an ASUS P5S800-VM motherboard and the net is full of complaints about this or a very similar problem with this board and several versions of Unix/Linux.  Many complaints, but no solutions.  I picked up three of these for this particular purpose and now I suspect they're essentially junk.

Get a boot disk and run memtestx86 on it for a few passes.  In most cases, issues like this are bad ram or a bad power supply.  If memtest says the ram is good but crashes overnight, try the power supply.

Nothing jumped out at me, but it is early…  :)

Has it crashed more than once?  Is it repeatable?  Have you done any other troubleshooting like memtestx86?  I have found most intermittent problems like this are bad ram or a bad power supply.

We're investigating some alternative (non-x86) architectures, but Raspberry Pi isn't amongst those at this time or in the foreseeable future. Its NICs are on a USB bus, it's not designed for nor really suitable for a good router platform.

I think that was copy/pasted from an older revision of the hardware that had 5x1Gb ports and one 100 Mb port, where the 100 Mb port was referred to as WAN like that. That one is 6 gigabit ports. It will definitely support however many WANs you want to put on it, 5 of them if you have one internal network (or VLANs on a single port) and the WANs on dedicated ports, or if you VLAN trunk your WANs, many more than that.

That NIC was not supported until FreeBSD 8.3, which is later than the 8.2 current pfsense is built on.

@jimp:

I have the -50. I don't have enough WAN bandwidth do to anything that would push the box hard enough to give a proper throughput test, but it handles what I have (13 Mbit/s between two WANs) without breaking a sweat.

It has no fan in the case, and so far anyhow it hasn't been terribly hot. Then again it's sitting practically in the path of the A/C output behind my desk. :-)
Some have had thermal concerns but you can mount a little case fan in there if you want and it's fine that way.

Stacking (4) BGA ramsinks on top of the aluminum "heatsink" also helps.

But… when I removed the snort package outright swap cleared up and system appears to be running normally.

By the way, the system has 4GB of RAM and is a core 2 duo Intel system.  Shouldn't be a problem, but oh well.  I was planning to bring up snort on a mirror port anyway.

We ended up getting this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816101364

We also planned on running a custom automation python script to run the radio station off air but alas it was fucking impossible to get sound working in PF sense, so PF sense is running in a virtualbox VM. Turns out we didn't end up needing the AOIP to route out over the router anyway (it's going out over AES to worldcom IP codec) so WAN speed is fine so long as it can hit a couple hundred MB/sec.

I also got one at my job to run BGP for our 2 fiber links but my boss didn't want to use pf sense since we already have a checkpoint firewall with 10 or 12 remote offices licensed.

Has anyone seen a price for the board?  I can hardly believe the only price I've seen: ca. €735.- (business) or €882.- (non-business) (http://www.lambda-tek.com/MBD-X9SPV-LN4F-3QE-B-Supermicro-MBD-X9SPV-LN4F-3QE-B~csDE/B934988)

I got a real cheap Igel Thinclient with Via C7 1ghz from eBay. I think it will be fine for me right now. I was just "missing" 10mbit, So I guess this small Hardware Upgrade will do fine ;)

So thanks for your help!

According to the USB ids file on Ubuntu 12.04 (idVendor = 0x0fe6, idProduct = 0x9700) indicates a Kontron DM9601. Based on the same file I would expect a MOSCHIP 7830 to have (idVendor = 0x9710, idProduct = 0x7830).

I downloaded the MCS7830 datasheet from http://www.datasheetarchive.com/MCS7830-datasheet.html The datasheet suggests the MCS7830 is capable of USB high speed (480Mbps) operation but your device is connecting at USB full speed (12Mbps).

Hence I expect you don't really have a MosChip 7830.

Maybe you could plug this device into a Linux system and see what driver (if any) claims it.

@wallabybob:

pfSense is based on FreeBSD which is not Linux.

Thanks, I did not know that.

@wallabybob:

It might work better with a pfSense 2.1 snapshot build which is based on FreeBSD 8.3, a more recent release than that used in earlier versions of pfSense.

I downloaded the latest version I found in the download page which was 2.0.1.  I guess I'll just wait for v.2.1 to appear and see if the RTL8187 works with it.

Thanks again.

Now, I have build in 2 further antennas. So I have one external and two internal antennas. Without luck. Nothing changed.
It seems, only antenna 2 is working. It doesn't matter, what I configure. In example the channel: I configure 10 but the system comes up with 1.

Further, I have recognized that the signal strength is always going down and up.
I have configuered a <shellcmd>to restart ath0_wlan0 after bootup. This solves the behavior and the channel is 10 which I have configured.

I think, there is a problem in startup. I would like to try a complete reconfigure-script after startup, but I don't know how.
Any help woukd be fine.</shellcmd>

Ended up using a PCI dual nic card (2 interfaces on one card) that i had lying around. I am just going to disable onboard.

maybe they will fix in 2.0.2 if there is s snapshot. oh well!

Quad port card you mean? One of the quad port Intel Pro/1000s would be your best bet, they're the most commonly available and known to work well.

pfsense supports only x86 and x64 infrastructure, so I think that you can't use this HW at all