@doofoo:

@network1:

Well went to order…. they are discontinued  :'(

They can be made to order, however there is a min order of 100.

So are their 98 others interested? or maybe someone willing to lend $98,000  ::)

Such a shame these looked like the best units i could find so far and resonably priced.

Did you ever find anything else remotely similar to this?  I got my hopes up on page 2 and now I see it's discontinued.  This was perfect for what I was looking for. :(

Yes, however decided on using IBM servers after all this.

This place are the ones that made the boxes for arbor… they will still make them for you too.

http://www.evoc.com/products/Network-Application-Platform/list.aspx

steve please if you can post some pictures of your built antenna ?:D thanks

FWIW, i previously had a WRAP board (without RTC battery backup) and i dearly missed the RTC backup. After a power cycle, for whatever reason (usually the kids' way of resetting), sometimes the network timesync did not work (don't know why). In these cases, i had to change the timeserver pool settings for it to reconnect. Without the correct time, the schedules where of and some members of the family did not have internet because of this. I now have the ALIX 2D13 and this problem is gone.

BTW, i didn't change the board for this reason, but because my good old WRAP died.

Celeron is not that good for servers, but I think it will be enough.

Pay attention on cpu load, if you get more then 70% load, you may need to change processor.

@stephenw10:

This is a long shot but does your CF card support UDMA?

Hi Steve,

Thanks for your reply.

In the BIOS, I had the DMA mode set to auto (the default). It detected the settings as follows:

Async DMA: Multiword DMA-2
Ultra DMA: Ultra DMA-5

I changed the DMA mode from auto to MWDMA2 to force it to use the detected Async DMA instead of Ultra DMA and… Success! The system now boots. I have been able to assign my interfaces and so far, everything looks great.

Thank you again for your help, and thanks also to Jimp for the suggestions.

Pete

The default is sufficient for most people, there really isn't any one "good" value for a tunable like that, it really depends on the specific situation.

@stephenw10:

The D525 will support ~60Mbps of VPN traffic, ~500Mbps of unencrypted bandwdith. That's without any packages slowing things down.

See here for some test results from a D510.

Steve

Thanks for the link.
Ok, with E3-1220L should be oversized for now but could help in futur…

Thanks for all

It will not boot from USB.

Though you could mount a drive connected via USB for additional storage with some manual hacking.

Another option for doing captures there would be realtime captures over ssh using wireshark to grab the captures remotely. I detail that procedure in the book, if you have it. There are instructions (not specific to pfSense, but might be close enough) in the wireshark FAQ for doing a capture over ssh into a local wireshark instance.

I also have had the Netgear GS108Tv2 for ~1 year and never gave me problems. But recently needed a bigger switch and got an HP ProCurveHP 1410-16G, at a good price.

Thanks everyone for your input. Very useful, I think I may ditch the ALIX board for a cheap PC. 
Almost the same price and I can repair it with common computer parts if needed.

Thanks

@robert_graff_79:

Thanks for the reply, for some reason that completely slipped my mind. I wonder how hard it would be to port to said hardware? Power PC versions of BSD UNIX do exist.

PPC is considered a Tier 2 architecture for FreeBSD.  I wouldn't hold your breath on a port of pfSense.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/committers-guide/archs.html

Thanks for your replies!
Yesterday I tried using "device polling". While the webUI was very slow around 80mbit were possible via FTP.

Today 2.0.1 came out, instantly tried it and now we have up to 70mbit without device polling.
This value seems okay for me given the Alix hardware specs.

The PRO/1000 GT will work, though without knowing what the onboard NIC is I can't speak to that.

Usually the nopacket mode was for really old hardware/BIOS setups like the WRAP.

jms,

Didn't have the chance to thank you for your replies.
Allthough I verified all your options I went with the first one.

Had a donator so I changed all my hardware to Dell 745 Boxes with Dualcore & 2GB RAM.
Installed a Intel NIC with 2 GB ports in an PCI-X slots and installed fresh boxes.

Now everything works like a charm.
Allthough I still couldn't figure out what happened.

Kind regards,

Me

You should raise a new pr on FreeBSD to have it added to the source code. Like this one: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=159836
It will then filter down to pfSense, hopefully when the new 2.1 code is built on FreeBSD 9.

Steve

@EricBiggs:

300Mbits is correct.
I'm not likely to need any other packages since my needs are fairly straight-forward. That said, having the headroom to add them later on if I desire would be optimal.
Wireless is needed yes, I can't believe I forgot that in the OP  :-[
Power consumption is irrelevant, as is the budget for the most part.
Hard Disk

I have no parts lying around unfortunately.

~ Thank you for the hasty reply:)
[/quote]

Do you need VPN capabilities?
I doubt the Asus would be heavily loaded unless you're using the VPN capabilities on it since the hardware NAT ASIC is capable of close to 900Mbit/s throughput easily.

Also, is there any need for inter-LAN routing?  i.e.  WLAN to LAN or VLAN to VLAN routing.  Again, the router probably isn't the slightest bit stressed by your internet connection speed.

As you probably know if you've looked into this the problem with having a compatible 3g modem is that most have a two mode operation. In the first mode they pretend to be a cd-rom drive with windows drivers on and in the second mode they present a serial interface that you can dial out on with AT commands.
In order to get into the second mode pfSense uses FreeBSD's u3g. To guarantee compatibility therefore the modem must be listed in u3g from FreeBSD 8.1 rel, here.

However there are others that will work. Some ZTE modems, for example, can be locked in modem mode by issuing an AT command.

Search the forum for success stories.

The best source is probably the documentation: http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Known_Working_3G-4G_Modems

Steve

Ah bugger this, after ringing a number of places and none getting back to me with a price  ???

Going to use IBM 306 servers, they are old, run 2 x sata drives, P4 3.0GHz and 4GB ram, 2 onboard intel plus quad intel nic fairly low power usage and heaps of spare parts. $150 can't complain.

Yes, the GPU is definitely not an issue since I'm running headless most of the time.  And the Pentium G620's GPU is so feeble anyway that you could probably run it on a x1 or x2 PCIe bus and not notice a difference.

I have not noticed any issues with CPU usage.  It hovers well under 5% most of the time (it's almost embarrassing how over-spec'ed this box is with a G620, 4GB RAM, an SSD, and a server-grade NIC).

Actually, now that you mention it, I'm not sure if I'm running in AHCI mode or not.  I'll have to check the BIOS settings.  The dmesg log detects my SATA controller as:```
atapci0: <intel ata="" controller=""> port 0xf110-0xf117,0xf100-0xf103,0xf0f0-0xf0f7,0xf0e0-0xf0e3,0xf0d0-0xf0df,0xf0c0-0xf0cf irq 20 at device 31.2 on pci0</intel>