I'd suspect the controller or cabling (and if that really is SCSI, termination).

EDIT : Error, I create a new topic for my problem ( http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,41937.0.html ).

The Hifn cards are only moderately-useful with a slow CPU.  There's actually a decent shot that using it with that CPU will slow you down.

any info about this?

Looking at the other posts i might go for a sandy bridge setup.  At 500mhz for 87 1000meg network equils roughly 5750 mhz.  Assuming the network card drivers can at least have a thread per processor per card thats a 2.87 ghz duel core or above.

I know we wont have gig too soon but my mate in sweeden is already on a 1 gig connection just as i got my 100 lol.   (he only see's 300 currently no dobt because of his network gear)

Might as well build it to last.

I was thinking about a a Pentium G850 (duel core) which is rated at 2.90GHz.  Is this thinking sound?

How does pfsense or rather BSD make use of the cores with network cards?  Would a quad give more headroom for the firewall if it was only running the two interfaces (with an intel or other nice onboard network).

I have had good results from the TP-Link TL-WN321G and Tenda W311U, both USB devices, both use Ralink chipsets and both support AP mode. The Tenda is supported by the run driver in pfSense 2.0 (but not in earlier versions). The TP-Link devices I used had an older version of the Ralink chipset and were recognised by the rum driver in pfSense 1.2.3. It appears newer versions of this device need the run driver.

I have had good results from the TP-Link TL-WN651G PCI card with Atheros chipset. It appears this card has been superseded by the TL-WN350GD.

I have no experience with mini-PCI cards on pfSense though Atheros cards seem well regarded. PC Engines (http://pcengines.ch) sell a range a mini-PCI cards with Atheros chipsets. However, if I recall correctly, they don't sell direct to EU customers. The web site has links to web pages of distributors in a number of other countries.

Does your WAN link use PPPoE or DHCP?

Can your provide some lines (say 10 to 20) from the system log BEFORE and after the apinger line you quoted?

Problem solved. The traffic shaper was the bottle neck.

Better sell the pc and get an appliance. Will save you a lot of money on your electrical bill!

Not sure if it's really worth spending extra money on a dedicated crypto card unless you are pumping out several 100Mb+ VPN connections.  Eventually most newer CPUs will have this built-in.

Xeons should handle large VPN bandwidth easily.  Also software crypto are easier to update with newer ones if it ever gets broken or hacked.

Darkk

Please include stge driver in base system.
After this procedure nic is up and recognized.

stge0@pci0:0:14:0: class=0x020000 card=0x81801043 chip=0x102313f0 rev=0x41 hdr=0x00    class      = network    subclass   = ethernet stge0: flags=108843 <up,broadcast,running,simplex,multicast,ipfw_filter>metric 0 mtu 1500 options=8209b <rxcsum,txcsum,vlan_mtu,vlan_hwtagging,vlan_hwcsum,wol_magic,linkstate>ether 00:1d:60:5c:xx:yy inet 192.168.0.254 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.0.255 inet6 fe80::21d:60ff:fe5c:e576%stge0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2 nd6 options=3 <performnud,accept_rtadv>media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex,flag0,flag2>) status: active</full-duplex,flag0,flag2></performnud,accept_rtadv></rxcsum,txcsum,vlan_mtu,vlan_hwtagging,vlan_hwcsum,wol_magic,linkstate></up,broadcast,running,simplex,multicast,ipfw_filter>

~20 MBits/sec on my old P2

last pid: 51498;  load averages:  0.21,  0.10,  0.08                                                                            up 0+00:14:48  14:04:53 86 processes:  3 running, 70 sleeping, 13 waiting CPU: 12.1% user,  0.0% nice,  8.2% system, 27.6% interrupt, 52.1% idle Mem: 37M Active, 19M Inact, 36M Wired, 30M Buf, 111M Free Swap:  PID USERNAME  PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU COMMAND   10 root      171 ki31     0K     8K RUN     11:29 42.97% idle   11 root      -68    -     0K   112K WAIT     0:43 25.98% {irq11: fxp0}   11 root      -68    -     0K   112K RUN      0:36 21.97% {irq10: stge0}

I am using the Huawei E220 on the Alix 2d.13. It is working but only with 1Mbit/s. On my linux machine I get up to 5Mbit/s with the same modem.

A "smart" switch is probably what you are looking for. They can be had for well under US$400.

They have some limitations over a full managed switch, but I find these limitations acceptable at 10% of the cost of the latter solution.

The smaller Watchguard boxes, the X10e X55e etc, are all ARM based and hence cannot run pfSense.
The larger units (19" rack mount) are all more powerful the the Alix board by some margin. They all have fans and are quite loud as standard though there is some scope for quietening them down.
Of the larger units only the X-peak box (X5000, X6000 and X8000) will work completely without any tweaking. They have 9 Intel NICs. They come with a 2.8GHz Pentium-4 and hence use a fair bit of power though it can be easily and cheaply swapped out.

The X-e units (x550e, x750e, x1250e etc) have some great features and work very well. However they require a bios tweak to boot the CF card and current versions of pfSense have a buggy driver for 4 of the 8 interfaces that means they cannot be relied upon at high load. The other 4 NICs work perfectly though and newer versions of FreeBSD have fixed those bugs.

Steve