@mhab12:

We're about to get a new 100 mb internet circuit run to our office via existing fiber (currently at 5mb).  The CPE from the carrier has SFP ports available so I had them leave a multi-mode LC fiber SFP for us for a 'future' change from copper to fiber on the very short run from their switch to ours (in the same rack).

Are there any advantages to fiber over copper on a link of this speed and short distance?  Reliability/latency/traffic handling/etc.?  Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Copper will likely be more reliable over such a short distance as fiber relies on optical transceivers and the laser diodes do fail.  And worse yet they often get flaky before completely failing.

All went well, I'm now on the Embedded nanobsd with vga.

Thanks Steve ;D

@Nonsense:

How were you able to overcome the network port driver issue in that motherboard?  I know there is a driver workaround out there, but I don't think it has ever been incorporated into the main software download. ???

There is no "network port driver issue". The NICs work fine.

@xanaro:

motherboard $55: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138332
IBM / Intel PRO/1000 PT Dual Port Gigabit NIC Adapter PCI-E ~$55: http://www.ebay.com/itm/350513539530

If you're interested, you could spend a little more and get the Intel S1200KP motherboard for $170.
C206 Chipset
Dual Intel NICs (onboard)
Low power.
Mini-ITX.

I have one and I'm happy with it.

@dreamslacker:

Also, since the SD card is mounted as a USB device, you must set pfSense to boot from USB device or the system might timeout before loading the USB host.

That's a good point, many (most?) modern motherboard SD slots are fed into the USB subsystem on the mobo, rather than a drive controller.

Some economy USB-SD adapters I've had in the past take so long to initialise that they just won't boot on many boards -  I'm sure they use similar bad chips in the economy SD-SATA adaptors.

If you're using d_rive-slot mounted_ plug-in SD-SATA or SD-PATA adaptors:
On some motherboards I've come across I've had to go into the mobo BIOS and either  reduce the "HDD boot wait"* / "HDD delay"* to zero seconds or max it to around 30 seconds (no hard and fast rule, depends on many factors)
This has enables some strange hardware to boot from a SD-SATA or sd-PATA adapter before timeouts/sleep states occur or give extra time for slow SD converter controllers to initialise. Not all BIOS have this boot wait setting, but has caught many people out using various SD adaptors.

This is 1/fun (almost as frustrating as fighting with strange settings to boot PCs from USB years ago**), so I prefer CF adaptors whenever I can, which never seem to have this problem.

HDD boot wait" / "HDD delay" is basically an extra spinup delay set in the motherboard BIOS for slow-starting drives or possibly for the SATA-spinup-in-sequence feature (which is to reduce the drive motor current current drawn from the power supply). The onboard drive contollers don't interrogate the drives until this extra delay is over; sometimes adding an extra 30 seconds is too much and any SD-SATA or SD-PATA card controllers go back to sleep. Conversely, some adapter controller chips need extra time for an internal initialisation.
Similarly, disabling unused drives in the BIOS can have a similar effect if the SD adapter prefers a rapid POST/BIOS runup (because it saves a few seconds)
If you find you need extra seconds for the SD adaptor to initialise after powerup, try setting all the drives in the BIOS to "Auto" to delay the startup a few extra seconds.

** moving motherboard jumpers so the USB ports weren't supplied power when the PC was off often helped USB booting problems (+5v running 24/7 is mainly for usb keyboard wakeup buttons, or nowadays charging your fone when the PC is off)

Sorry, I post in a wrong thread, please kindly ignore, thanks.

@cmb:

Probably the easiest is to change over to VLANs on existing hardware, remove any reference to the physical interface that will be removed, then back it up and restore it. That's assuming you're keeping the same type of NICs. If not, you can either reassign after restoring or manually change in the XML before restoring.

Thanks for the suggestions.  I'll give that a try.

FreeBSD is not Linux. In particular, the interfaces of kernel modules such as device drivers to the rest of the kernel are very different.

The Linux driver will need substantial modification to work on FreeBSD.

Take a look on hardware compatibility list.

http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.1R/hardware.html

I preffer and suggest 64 bits installs.

what kind of services you need to filter on this pfsense?

@kakashi:

is it possible to create multi ip (each vlan) and overide dns for that multi ip with dns forwarder ?
example : data.local.lan for ip vlan11 (192.168.2.100), ip vlan21 ((192.168.3.100) etc
since freenas support vlan that easy to configure and hook to each vlan member.

It might be possible with some DNS supported on pfSense but I can't se how it would be configured for dnsmasq through the web GUI.

@kakashi:

from ur advise its like no problem with cpu prosesor

I didn't say that. I suggested you MIGHT get higher efficiencies through using a different NIC for the NAS. To be specific, some efficiencies MIGHT be gained through use of jumbo frames (I don't know if NAS supports jumbo frames on its NIC; I don't know if jumbo frames are supported on the pfSense NIC you intend to use) or use of interrupt moderation features of SOME intel Gigabit NICs.

It has been stated a number of times in the pfSense forums that an Alix board is capable of pushing through about 80Mbps. Those boards have a 500MHz CPU, single core. I would be surprised if your system is really using 70% of the CPU if ALL it is doing is forwarding 80Mbps to or from the NAS. But I don't know what else it was doing when you took the figures you reported.

I don't see an answer to my previous question:

Is there a good reason why you haven't connected freenas to the same VLAN as host client so the traffic is handled by the switch alone?

If the NAS was on the same VLAN as its clients (or even a significant number of clients) then they could talk directly through the switch without having to go through pfSense.

Just a quick update. The system I built for someone with the G620 is running fine. No regrets.

So I wanted to build a 2nd system for myself at home, but change the processor to a Xeon E3-2130 or higher so that I could run a bunch of VMs on it. When I priced it out, a build-your-own Xeon system with the specs I needed was roughly the same price as a preconfigured HP Proliant ML110 G7 (the one with the E3-1240 CPU) for $720. So I bought the HP. It's small and quiet. I installed Fedora 16 on the box because I wanted to use Linux KVM for virtualization. I passed one of the 82574L NICs directly to the PFSense VM and it works great. Runs at 39-40 watts when idle and VMs running.

(I didn't choose ESXi 5 because it doesn't like the ICH10R controller in the HP. It 'purple-screens'. I tried Xen, but its weird and I'd need to recompile PFSense for driver support. I decided on Linux KVM and I'm not looking back. It's fast. I also really like configuring my VMs from the command line. ESXi, Xen and even RedHat's RHEV (KVM-based commercial product) all require WINDOWS clients to administer.)

That chipset doesn't look to be supported yet even in the latest FreeBSD. http://wiki.freebsd.org/WiFi80211n
pfSense is currently built on FreeBSD 8.1 so will not drive the AR9380.

Steve

Took a while, but I finally have most things running.  I ordered the wrong disk adapter board at first… there's a difference between Micro SATA and mSATA.  Go figure.  Fantastic naming convention there by the way.  Not confusing at all.  I found the correct one on the second try and did the full install in a computer, remounted the SSD on the Soekris box, then fired it up.  Worked like a charm.

I finally configured the wireless in the last hour, and though I have barely used it yet I have succesfully connected and browsed a few web pages using the Ubiquiti SR71-E as the wireless card.  So I can confirm that works.  Or has so far, anyway.  I am only running it in G mode, NOT N or A modes as I don't have any wireless hardware that runs those two modes to test with.

I have OpenVPN setup and was able to successfully send traffic across the tunnel one time out of 10 attempts so far... I haven't tried again since that one success.  I did notice that while I was able to successfully connect prior to that success, I wasn't able to pass traffic across the VPN connection until I did a full reboot on the firewall.  Obviously something is not loading correctly.  I spent two nights working on it, and finally out of desperation I tried a restart and it just starts working.  YEAH!!!!

To do:
TX Power setting, I'm not sure what to set that at, so I'm reading up on that.
IPSEC VPN from my android tablet: so far have been unable to make any connection at all.

I'd recommend you go Supermicro with an Atom d510 or d525. They won't be completely fanless but will be very quiet, will easily do 100mbps normal and 10mbps VPN:
http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=SY-515APHF

I see no reasons why it wouldn't work on this chipset. The only thing is I have found some of the built in NICs don't have good driver support yet (Supermicro for instance use the enw Intel NICs)

Nice one.  :)

Steve

@Gero:

Do you think changing to 2.1 will be some thing I can do by remote?

Theoretically yes. However it's a big change moving the code base from FreeBSD 8.1 to 9.X. I upgraded from 1.2.3 to 2.0 by simply clicking 'upgrade' in the webgui which was a similar change. However 'your millage may vary'!

Steve

Yeah, I disabled console and all com ports, now it`s working great…

Thanks for support!

According to this appliance manufacturer, it does work:

http://www.osnet.eu/fr/contenu/firewall-fwa-3030

The appliance uses 5 x 82583v and google translation:
"The FWA-3030 was tested with pfSense-Release v.2.0 and is 100% compatible…."

Update:

According to this post, where the poster did a dmesg dump with pfSense 2.0, the em(4) drivers are used for the 82583v.
http://osdir.com/ml/freebsd-questions/2011-11/msg00796.html