Thank you for getting back to me, however i believed it was a bad hard drive i had installed, but i replaced it with a 4GB CF card and now seems to be stable. Its better with a CF installtion, seems to be a lot quicker and less heat.

@stephenw10:

The Alix should be good for ~85Mbps routing/NAT so you may be OK. Not much headroom though.
An Atom based box will be good for around 500Mbps but even that is quite a step up in power consumption compared to the Alix. 5W vs 25W or there abouts.
Use a VM as you have suggested if you need to.

Steve

That's true, but only in one direction.  If you're downloading at 80Mbit/s you won't be seeing 20Mbit/s back in the other direction.

The next step up would be an Atom box, mine have been able to push about 300Mbit/s TOTAL (upstream + downstream), though an i3 has about the same power consumption (if done right) and is a LOT faster (as in, wire-speed on Gig-E with a high-end i3).

@galaga:

interrupt                          total      rate
irq0: clk                      44649833      1000
irq1: atkbd0                          18          0
irq8: rtc                        5714155        127
irq10: uhci0 uhci1                    1          0
irq11: fxp0                      485977        10
irq14: ata0                      121600          2
irq15: vr0 ata1                  1241827        27
Total                          52213411      1169

This is incorrectly configured: irq14 and irq15 normally are "edge triggered" interrupts so are unsuitable for use by PCI devices which use level triggering. The BIOS might have some options which would allow vr0's interrupt line to be moved to an unused irq or one shared with another PCI device.

hi,
thaks for your help !!!
is working port was cuau0 and connection is now on serial !
many thanks….

I have couple of 560,570,530 units
depend the size of your network and internet connections

System Uptime
Uptime 60 days, 14 hours, 7 minutes, 46 seconds.

the 560 unit have by default 1 wan and 4 lan but each lan port can configured as a lan/wan or dmz

a short review

+green(power)
+boot in ~15sec
+very stable for <70mb/s internet connections
+easy to manage/configure
+minimal hardware (Processor : XScale-IXP42x 16mb ram)

-unstable ipsec/pptp after a while
-load balancing is strange  :)
-end of life support 07.2013(latest release 03.2011)

the latest bios release is 1.40
http://support.advantech.com/support/DownloadSRDetail.aspx?SR_ID=1-22S1SY

1)you don`t have hyper threading enabled
2)ACPI is disabled

with 2 procs operating systems will see 4 cores(each CPU+hyper threading )

L.E:
print screen is from a pfsense on esxi but should be the same on your system

pfsense.png
pfsense.png_thumb

Thanks very much for posting this, I am using a WRAP and having all sorts of problems till I found this.

@turboproc:

@nexusN:

@turboproc:

@fragged:

@turboproc:

@fragged:

I have the same board with a Intel Pentium G630T and 8 GB of RAM. How did you setup C3 state to be set after a reboot?

The command I used was sysctl dev.cpu.1.cx_lowest=C3 (and 2 and 3). I left CPU 0 to C1 as lowest value.

What I don't know is what states the G630T supports. I'll have to check this.

Yes, but did you set it to apply on boot? As that setting resets every time you reboot the system. The G630T supports C1-C3 states and reduces the clock speed from default 2.3 GHz down to 1.6 GHz when idle.

To make sure it works after every reboot, put it in /boot/loader.conf.local .

Furthermore, to reduce power use the powerd option in System/Advanced/Miscellanious.

Hi,

I see you are also using nanoBSD on USB as I did,
would you mind checking if you have got from a similar problem as I did with PowerD?
By turning off the throttling, can you see the EIST CPU frequency correctly?
You may get it by first putting the below in /boot/loader.conf.local

hint.p4tcc.0.disabled=1 hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled=1

then in command prompt enter the below:

sysctl dev.cpu.0.freq_levels

and you should see some A1/B1, A2/B2…...in which As are the freq of the CPU and Bs are the corresponding power consumption.

The below is my case:
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,46912.0.html

Appreciated if you can help identify the source of the issue.

Hi, I did some checking as I don't want to play too much with a production firewall. First I can't find the OIDs starting with hint. you are referring to. When I check for dev.cpu.0.freq_levels I get the following results:

dev.cpu.0.freq_levels: 2500/35000 2400/33000 2300/31000 2200/29000 2100/28000 2000/26000 1900/24000 1800/23000 1700/21000 1600/20000 1400/17500 1200/15000 1000/12500 800/10000 600/7500 400/5000 200/2500

Thanks for trying to help.
Your displayed freq is not the EIST one, while without throttling disabled I am not sure if you are sharing the same problem with me.

Anyone know where these are available in the UK and maybe a price.

Thanks in advance.
Chris

@stephenw10:

If you just need to use the remaining ports as a switch in order to save having a a separate device you just need to bridge them. The documentation on this is a bit sparse!
http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/What_is_a_bridged_interface_and_how_would_one_be_used%3F
I attempted this on my own box as a test a while back, see this post and few following it:
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,25011.msg236750.html#msg236750
You should be aware that the resulting bridged interfaces will not be as fast as a switch. (still quite fast though!)

Also have you read through the, now ridiculously long, thread for these fireboxes?
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,20095.0.html

There is a bug in the driver included with pfSense 2.0.1 used by the four interfaces on the right hand side of the box (msk0-3) which can cause the interface to stop responding. You should connect less important clients to these! I have never had a problem if they are connected at 100Mbps. This will hopefully be fixed by updated code in 2.1.

Steve

Thanks for the info. I did read parts of the firebox thread, so I know that changing the CPU would be helpful in order to reduce overall consumption and so on. They are pretty much x86 boxes, hence the appeal I guess!

If I can secure the firebox I have my eye one I will definitely follow up. I know what I want is certainly do-able know which is a big help, so thanks :)

The KB connector is the one that appears to have a Floppy-sized molex power connector on in the picture. I have a PS2 connector salvaged from an old clone on mine. I forget if I switched wires around or if it worked as is.
If you're trying nano, I don't think it's ever going to work. I played with the BIOS and got nowhere. It will boot a full install from a laptop HDD. If you get it working, check out the LED module here: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,36546.15.html

What could be wrong about that?  ;D
Why didn't I think of this at Ikea?

Hmm, perhaps I could add a beech veneer to my firebox….

Steve

It looks like I'll be able to do this wit a dual nic pfsense and a managed/smart switch cabable of port based vlans.
I would have the NAS port and the pfsense port common to all vlans. And then setup the 3 vlans via ports. makes configuration a little more difficult but I think it would work.

http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Tuning_and_Troubleshooting_Network_Cards#Intel_igb.284.29_and_em.284.29_Cards

If you have a provider that hands off an ethernet (wired or wireless) connection then you do not need your ISP's device.  If you've got a provider that brings service in over phone lines or coax then you will need the appropriate modem from them to convert to ethernet.  Most ADSL and Cable modems can be set to bridge mode where all they do is the conversion and your hardware (in this case, pfsense) handles the DHCP or PPPoE handshake.

The Alix 2D13 accepts 7 to 20V - http://store.netgate.com/ALIX2D13-P40C85.aspx - I get fully assembled kits with CF card and pfSense from Netgate. The kit comes with 15V 18W power supply. I have been running one directly on 12V for about a month with no trouble. The Alix 2D13 uses about 6W in operation.
In some places I already have an ordinary TP-Link TD-W8901G ADSL router/AP in front of the pfSense and lots of friends are using them. It's easy to use the same thing everywhere, then we can keep a spare. I could try the TD-8616, should use less power, but then that is another different box to keep spares for, document and support. TD-W8901G draws about 6W, so if a theoretical USB ADSL modem needed say 3W anyway, I am only 3W worse off with the TP-Link. For support it is more hassle - the separate ADSL box is another point of HW or SW failure at a remote site.
For the work connections I already have multiple pfSense, so would like to keep using pfSense everywhere. Then we can have similar settings at every location and OpenVPN connections that work (no time wasted debugging connecting between different router software). So I think I'll stick with the pfSense on ALIX with an ADSL device sitting in front of OPT1.
I am in Nepal with a mix of city, town and remote connections with a wide range of speeds. Power is always a problem here - often worse in the cities due to extended hours of load-shedding!

@jms703:

Curious, now that you've had the board for some time, what are your thoughts? Any issues or problems?

So far the only issues I do have is that 64 bit version of pfsense 2.0.1 does not run due to graphic issues.
I did not found the time to try out if the freebsd graphic driver implemented in pfsense 2.1 snapshot is working better.

http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,46489.0.html

@jms703:

Are you handling any IPSec or OpenVPN with this hardware? I'm interested to hear how this Atom chip handles VPN traffic.

Not yet. I'm using this box as an "oversized" firewall with squid and snort for home use. OpenVPN I also will set up in the future. But here I will not be able to give you some helpfull information regarding maximum performance.