Do you see a crash report? Does it crash if you don't fit an expansion card? Nothing in those logs looks like a problem. Is it stable running some other OS? Steve

@lse4 Install the SPI.1A module on the SPI header of the apu2 system board. Please watch the orientation (white stripe). Then power on. The SPI module will override the on-board flash, which could be blank or corrupted. Boot tinyCore Linux or another OS from an USB stick. Then remove the SPI module while power is on, and reflash the BIOS, from the booted system (OS). Then all will be fine for you

Curiosity got the better of me there is nothing under the lable no cutouts for buttons at all

@mr-john-0 As today AES-NI and/or Intel Quick Assist will do that job integrated inside of the CPU, much better. At the photo shown above, you may try out to unmount the PCIe adapter from the PCIe card, if this is able to realize! You may stich in that adapter (if it is one) into a other PCIe card like a NIC to mount it back. It is not a guarantie but its worth to try it out.

@patch I have always been an optimist and it has served me well in the past. Besides 8860's are not all that common. I had to purchase mine in Canada. The 8860 is a terrific Firewall/VPNs! Plus they have 3 spare Sata ports and 2 spare mStata ports with one additional mSata already been used. I installed 3x Enterprise mSata SSDs in ZFS Raid in my 8860 to ensure extra redundancy etc. It's cheap insurance for a lot of peace of mind. Normal SSD's are not infallible, hence the upgrade to Enterprise and the ZFS Raid also provides extra data protection and much longer UP time if/when a SSD ever fails. Brad.

@patch Thanks, but I am keen to eliminate the provided Aussie Broadband modem (as it's not particularly reliable) and, if possible, would like an all-in-one solution (rat than a separate modem in bridge mode) for both elegance and also fewer devices to go wrong in the chain...so I am keen to know whether the Transcend module will do the job.

I have a serial GPS on cuau0 for NTP time keeping. What device? cuau0, cuau1... is serial and cuaU0, cuaU1,... is USB, where it is connected to? What chip set (ublox,...) Around 1 in 10 boots, I get no active peers on NTP status. Sometimes I have ~12 satellites in waiting chain and 5 till 8 in usage, but sometimes there is no connection. It is owed to the circumstance that the antenna (active) must be also good positioned to get a flavour connection and being able to reach many satellites. In the past I would reboot the firewall and in the majority of cases the GPS would come up functioning. You may be able to high up the delay time at the boot time too! This has gone on for over two years of using pfSense on the same appliance. Which hardware you are using? Today instead of rebooting, I ran cu from the command > line (cu -l cuau0 -s 4800) and got a response that there > was a stale lock on the port and got no data from the GPS. You may be able to use the console on two ways: console ntpq > enter > PE > enter cu -s 9600 -l /dev/cuaU1 or cu -s 9600 -l /dev/gps0 to see the output. Seems to be a bit of a possible race condition where a lock is not removed in a timely manner during shutdown or the reboot process. The delay time might be tzhe right answer in your case.

@cg50000p Available on Amazon now. 2.7 is fairly solid. I have no problems using it with i-225’s and would assume i-226’s are fine.

@charlesdevis My Dell Wyse 5070 consumes 8W per the TP-Link HS-300 power strip that it’s plugged into: [image: 1675089551249-f64a8b21-32d6-4ee8-9bb3-eb8efc047d00.jpeg] (screen shot is from my Sense device that reads power stats from the powerstrip) While my Asus RT-AC86U consumes 9W of power

@stephenw10 Probably the appliance I’d get if shopping for one. IF I had it to do over instead of a nice albeit older Dell i7 for free and then add the cost of several Intel i225 NIC’s, I’d do this appliance. The cost of the NIC’s about the same as this appliance. The new gen processor while not today’s i7 my guess is it outperforms the early gen i7 in the old Dell. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B6J2ZKTM/?coliid=I2ZTQKSXOF5P6&colid=B016TSAJFGNR&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it&th=1

@stephenw10 I think you're right. As far as I can tell the update is for motherboards with the embedded i-225 chipset not the stand alone NIC's.

Here's the port-forward test: [image: 1674519553610-b76962a6-20c9-4010-acde-a6143826f1ca-image.png] Outbound averaged 586 with a max of 812. Inbound averaged 530 with a max of 825.

Yes, when this happened what do the LEDs show? Also, yes, if it was installed using a UFS filesystem then power outages like that can certainly cause booting issues. However we now install everything as ZFS by default. Steve

@stephenw10 Yeah I guess that's the last thing to try. The weird part is the port work fine when connected to each other like ix2 <---> ix3 but don't when connected to ubiquiti sw Thanks for all the suggestions and help though, really appreciate it!

Hello Sir @stephenw10 After working with my boss at our office we were able to get in the commands to get the driver updated and I have not had a problem since. I will let you know if it fails again but for now the issues is resolved. Thank you!

Not yet: https://www.freshports.org/net/realtek-re-kmod/

Decided to put the Protectli away and go back to my main router with the Chelsio card installed. I can also confirm Wireguard is working fine with it and 2.7. I only have 2 tunnels up but I can't imagine more would make a difference. I even plugged directly into a Frontier ONT and received a DHCP address. Looking good!

You might try a 2.7 install too, if that isn't one. The drivers there are from FreeBSD main. Steve

@stephenw10 Wanted to close this thread by thanking you for your advice. You were absolutely right. I had to solve an issue with the pfSense box not completing boot cycle when not connected to a display but that was, in the end, just a cabling concern once I had the correct cable in hand... But then, reset the switch to factory defaults just to be sure, changed the desktop IPv4 settings to get its address by DHCP from the pfSense box and voila! she has WAN access now. Thanks again!

@stephenw10 , I work for a switching/routing hardware vendor, you'd be surprised at what is supported with BSD, the issue is that most of this code never leaves the private GIT repo of the vendors. What is exposed to the OS, for these boxes is the physical switch ports, the appear as native ethernet interfaces like any other device, the core difference however is that you can adjust the behavior of the ASICs that connect each of the ports. The switch ports and intra VLAN switching will operate natively without any need for the control plane to do anything, since this is the defacto operation of an ASIC in an un-managed switch. As long as the ASIC has the instruction for the VLAN tags per port, it will operate like a dumb switch. If not then all the ports are basically operating on an common un-tagged VLAN, which is usually not wise. The complexity start when you need traffic to exit a VLAN / IP interface. These boxes have the potential to operate as gen 1 or gen 2 firewalls that traditionally did not have custom designed firewall ASICs or FPGAs. These boxes would still use the CPU for inspection but would significantly reduce the cost point of a dense 1G or 2x 10G setup, with the basic assumption the CPU could handle 10Gbps of traffic.. which is unlikely for an Athlon. I doubt that PFsense development community has the time justification for driving even basic port to port single ASIC development for the free community. Realistically when your dealing with 3+ 10G links, pushing traffic over the CPU is not really viable at those speeds especially not on a Athlon CPU.