Should be fine unless you plan on installing Snort IDS or other resource intensive packages.

Hi,

If you are searching by model description you will found that it has only 128mb of ram and 64 mb of flash…i think is too less for pfsense but  you may try to improve it check if you can add more mb of ram's and the more flash space in pdf description it's type one compact flash.
See link: http://www.gta.com/downloads/external/productGuide/GB-1200_HardwareSpec.pdf

An external AP would give you access to 802.11n, that would be faster yes, but not necessarily more stable. An Alix with an Atheros 5413 card is perfectly stable, and it supports 802.11a wich is often used for wireless bridging because it usually have much less interference. It ultimately depends on how much speed and flexibility you really need.

@bmironb:

It's inconvenient to use AP wired to alix ? i think is a better solution in comparation with wifi cards, you also could use 300mbs acess points and on those to use antennas.From my experience  will be a better solution and more stable, i'm using pfsense but on pc platform with AP on lan AP is exactly your specified routers from above.

The fact that you can still see the ZTE CD-ROM implies that it has not switched. Although you can see the MMC device which id different to other similar modems. It could be that usb serial driver has not attatched to the ports.
You should load usb_modeswitch and try one of the ZTE command strings.
perha ~~# ZTE MF190 devices

DefaultVendor= 0x19d2
DefaultProduct= 0x0117

MessageContent="5553424312345678000000000000061e000000000000000000000000000000"
MessageContent2="5553424312345679000000000000061b000000020000000000000000000000"
MessageContent3="55534243123456702000000080000c85010101180101010101000000000000"

NeedResponse=1

CheckSuccess=20

Steve~~

I'm also in the market for a good wireless N dual band access point. Small Net Builder's benchmarks has convinced me that to get the best wireless performance I should just buy a wireless router and go dd-wrt (which I am familiar with).

The RT-N66U looks great, and it has dd-wrt support, even approved from ASUS. Might end up with that, but wireless AC is looking appealing too, might stick it out with my GN router till AC comes out.

https://github.com/pfsense/pfsense/blob/master/etc/rc.bootup#L137

https://github.com/pfsense/pfsense/blob/master/etc/inc/system.inc#L1529

https://github.com/pfsense/pfsense-tools/blob/master/pfPorts/alix_reset_button/files/alix_reset_button.c

There isn't a constant polling going on for that button, though perhaps you could setup a minicron process to run the poll every few seconds

I am also using the 7120, in my home lab. Got it off of Ebay for $75.00.

Installing pfsense was exactly the same as the instruction for the 5420 except I did not disable ACPI.
I have ditched it for a dell poweredge 850 with gigabit NIC(6).

Currently working on getting pfsense on my HP Neoware e140 and e100.

Hi Steve,

Thank you for your answer. Now I remember that to enter the bios I was forced to use a keyboard and a monitor.

From the dmesg output it seems that interface rl3 was erroneously disabled via bios instead interface et0, wasn't it?

Regards,
Stenio

Finally, I've sent my Alix to an electronics repair shop. They just told me that one of the VT6105M NICs was dead. This fault caused my problem - after removing the NIC, my board boots again. However, I'm neither able to find this NIC in any shop in our country nor as a part of a used motherboard or a PCI card (people from the repair shop offered me a new NIC chip, however, it was very expensive).

I know that the NIC can be bought in China, but I still have a (possibly stupid) question - can be this VIA chip replaced by another "similar" one with same pinout from VIA Rhine series? Can it be replaced by a chip from another manufacturer?

Thanks for your responses. AWM

I suggest you search the forums for PXG4BPI - I think the question has come up a few times in the past.

Thank you all for your kind responses. By removing the screw underneath the warrantee laber I was able to open the case.

Usually if you have an incompatible timecounter set then the logs get filled with errors very quickly. Something like:

kernel: timecounter TSC must not be in use when changing frequencies; change denied

You can check from the command line:

[2.0.1-RELEASE][root@pfsense.fire.box]/root(3): sysctl kern.timecounter.hardware kern.timecounter.hardware: TSC [2.0.1-RELEASE][root@pfsense.fire.box]/root(4): sysctl kern.timecounter.choice kern.timecounter.choice: TSC(800) i8254(0) dummy(-1000000)

I don't have speedstep on that machine so I haven't switched from TSC.
I think I noted most of what you need to do here:
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,20095.msg161139.html#msg161139

My experience with 2GHz Pentium-M 760 was that the est(4) driver brought up an incorrect set of speedstep frequencies and the logs filled with 'calcru: runtime went backwards' errors. This may be solvable though.

On my box I saved 5W at idle, about 15%. I saved far more with a DC power supply.

Steve

Good to hear jimp, but the APM command actually hasn't stopped my start/stop count from increasing very fast… not AS fast, but still far too quickly.

@stephenw10:

Matguy this is some great information you're providing, thanks!  :)

Having never tried it I'm pretty vague about VMware. I would assume that if you had a CPU that supported VT-d you may be able to take advantage of the various hardware offloading features on a NIC to a greater extent?

The only time I have used VMware was on the, previously mentioned, HP microserver and it was super slick.  ;) However the cpu in that quite low powered, no where near the processing capability of the G530.

Steve

Hey, no problem, ESX and ESXi are kind of my baby…

Standard Hardware Offloading (TOE) is supported by ESXi, they just need to be on the HCL.  Now, if you're talking about specialized hardware, like, say, the Bigfoot Killer Nics, to get full use out of 'em you'd probably have to use VT-d, I didn't see 'em on the HCL, but I think there's drivers out for 'em.

The modems that are known to work are all listed here:

http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Known_Working_3G-4G_Modems

If it's not on that list, then it may or may not work, you'd just have to try it.

If it does work when you try it, let us know and we'll add it to the list.

@Martog:

I haven't had a chance to rip any Barracuda's apart as we just recently started to deploy them.  I got lucky my Sendio that a customer didn't want has a Core 2 Duo 6420 on the inside, 1GB ECC memory and a front panel LCD.

Bonus

I find it interesting that your modem is eventually recognised by u3g but only after switching with usb_modeswitch.
Coincidentally ends up with the same vendor and product IDs as previous Huawei modems?  :-\

It seems to be highlighting a lack of understanding on my part.  ::)

Also there seems to be certain amount of wheel re-inventing going on here. There are numerous threads on the board with similar problems and outcomes and people are writing scripts and such. I'm fairly sure almost all of this could be handled by devd, perhaps simply by adding an appropriate conf file to /usr/local/etc/devd.
Time to read up on this.

Steve