There is quite a range of wireless NICs that work with pfSense, though not as big as the range of NICs which work with Linux. I have been interested only in wireless NICs that work as Access Points. I've had good results with

PCI: TP-Link TL-WN651G
USB: Tenda W311U and TP-Link TL-WN321G

At this stage wireless "N" features are not supported though soma cards which are "N capable" are supported.

Thanks very much for the detailed clarification!  Makes perfect sense now.

-MediocreFred.

You state 50 meg and 15 meg, but is that megabit or megabyte? There is a big difference and all too often they get mixed together and people usually don't clarify. Also is it two connections running at 50 and 15 respectively or is it one connection with 50 down and 15 up? Intel is always a good choice, can't usually go wrong with any Intel card. Broadcom is another good choice right behind Intel. If it's 50Mb/sec then a 10/100 card will do but if it's 50 MB/sec you need to step up to gigabit.

If it's a P4 HT system it is most likely PCI based but might have some PCIe slots (definitely no PCI-X unless it is a server/workstation class machine which I doubt). PCI cards are getting harder to find for obvious reasons. As you search ebay don't be afraid to look at PCI-X listings, just make sure they are universal keyed and they will fit in a standard 5V PCI slot (working at the slower PCI speeds of course). See here for a picture description: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PCI_Keying.png.

If you truly have a 50 MB/sec and 15 MB/sec connection (or a single 50/15 in MB format not Mb), then you need to consider an upgrade to some kind of PCIe or PCI-X card (and system to support it). The reason being, PCI is a shared bus (so is PCI-X but it has a LOT more bandwidth, PCIe isn't shared) and a single gigabit card operating at full tilt can almost saturate the entire PCI bus at 125 of 133 MB/s. That doesn't leave much room for any other PCI connected devices (even embedded devices) which could hog precious system bus bandwidth from your NIC(s) and thus slow down your internet speeds.

It's a home network and you want to run Xbox and streaming video over it? What on earth do you need gigabit NICs for unless you're going to try and make pfsense your switch too which isn't the best idea. The question you need to answer is "what is the speed of your internet connection?" That alone will determine what hardware you need and whether you really need that quad port gigabit card. That's what Cry Havok was asking, and I seriously doubt you have a 1 GB connection to the internet. Semantics here but even if you have a "1 GB" connection, a gigabit card will be the bottleneck as it is only 1 Gb which is further reason why I don't think you have an internet connection that can fully utilize a gigabit card let along a quad port card.

pfSense binaries are built for x86 systems (32-bit and 64-bit) and won't run on sparc systems.

Thanks for the info :(  Time to find another card.

Alright so I did a bit more testing.

the pfsense lcdproc package doesn't include the driver i need, LIS.so

So I uninstalled it, and manually installed the latest freebsd pkg from
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-8.1-release/All/lcdproc-0.5.3.tbz

to my dismay, this also didn't include the lis.so driver (even though it should according to lcdproc's documentation)

I did some more reading and it looks like the LIS driver needs libftdi to function properly, so I installed that from
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-8.1-release/All/libftdi-0.17.tbz

I uninstalled and reinstalled the lcdproc freebsd pkg, and still no joy.

it seems like just about nobody has tried to use this driver on freebsd/pfsense/monowall/freenas

I did find an article on using this in MYTHTV:
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Nmedia_pro-lcd

it looks like I might be able to get this running if i install from source (that way I can tell it which drivers to install, and force the LIS driver)
but this is where im completely out of my element.

Can someone please get me moving in that direction? I'd really appreciate it.

My eyes are bleeding at this point. too much reading.

The other thing that comes to mind - this is a driver that should be included in the pfsense package, but isn't. So perhaps there's some technical reason that this simply won't work on freeBSD/Pfsense?

Yes

Port the kernel patches, update the build scripts, setup your builder, and off you go.

The nature of build systems, kernel patches and related, it's a very complex process if you aren't familiar with all those things. And changing base FreeBSD versions always creates additional fallout, which is why 2.0 is 8.1.

Just thought I'd follow up. This was fixed with the referred build. We are currently running 2.0-RC3 in multiple production environments without issue. The Dell R310's were great choices from a pricing and feature perspective, and work great with pfSense 2.0.

Thanks.

@fmertz:

https://github.com/fmertz/fbled

The code was updated again: This is a (very) minor code update, no new executables were created.
The source code now checks that the host system is x86. It compiles the LED code if it is, otherwise, it compiles with the emulator (the text "debug" version). This is for completeness, and the fun of having code compiling on all platforms where the OS runs. I have tested Linux/eglibc with ARM, SPARC, PowerPC and MIPS. It should compile and run on non x86 FreeBSD as well, but I don't have anything available to test with. Again, fairly pointless, but fun nonetheless. A Linux SPARC build session goes like this:

fcm@NetraX1B:~$ git clone git://github.com/fmertz/fbled.git Cloning into fbled... remote: Counting objects: 83, done. remote: Compressing objects: 100% (72/72), done. remote: Total 83 (delta 44), reused 13 (delta 5) Receiving objects: 100% (83/83), 108.40 KiB, done. Resolving deltas: 100% (44/44), done. fcm@NetraX1B:~$ cd fbled/ fcm@NetraX1B:~/fbled$ ./autogen.sh **Warning**: I am going to run `configure' with no arguments. If you wish to pass any to it, please specify them on the `./autogen.sh' command line. processing . Running aclocal  ... Running autoheader... Running automake --gnu  ... configure.ac:9: installing `./install-sh' configure.ac:9: installing `./missing' Makefile.am: installing `./depcomp' Running autoconf ... Running ./configure --enable-maintainer-mode ... checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c checking whether build environment is sane... yes ... checking for struct if_data.ifi_opackets... no configure: creating ./config.status config.status: creating Makefile config.status: creating config.h config.status: executing depfiles commands Now type `make' to compile. fcm@NetraX1B:~/fbled$ make make  all-am make[1]: Entering directory `/home/fcm/fbled'  CC     fbled.o  CCLD   fbled make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/fcm/fbled' fcm@NetraX1B:~/fbled$ uname -a Linux NetraX1B 2.6.32-5-sparc64 #1 Tue Jun 14 11:30:39 UTC 2011 sparc64 GNU/Linux fcm@NetraX1B:~/fbled$ ./fbled fbled 0.1.3.2 S[..*.....] L[........] T[........] 3[........]

A FreeBSD session goes like this:

[fcm@BSDDev ~]$ git clone git://github.com/fmertz/fbled.git Cloning into fbled... remote: Counting objects: 83, done. remote: Compressing objects: 100% (72/72), done. remote: Total 83 (delta 44), reused 13 (delta 5) Receiving objects: 100% (83/83), 108.40 KiB | 36 KiB/s, done. Resolving deltas: 100% (44/44), done. [fcm@BSDDev ~]$ cd fbled/ [fcm@BSDDev ~/fbled]$ ./autogen.sh **Warning**: I am going to run `configure' with no arguments. If you wish to pass any to it, please specify them on the `./autogen.sh' command line. processing . Running aclocal  ... Running autoheader... Running automake --gnu  ... configure.ac:9: installing `./install-sh' configure.ac:9: installing `./missing' Makefile.am: installing `./depcomp' Running autoconf ... Running ./configure --enable-maintainer-mode ... checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c ... checking for struct if_data.ifi_opackets... yes configure: creating ./config.status config.status: creating Makefile config.status: creating config.h config.status: executing depfiles commands Now type `make' to compile. [fcm@BSDDev ~/fbled]$ make make  all-am   CC    fbled.o   CCLD  fbled [fcm@BSDDev ~/fbled]$ uname -a FreeBSD BSDDev 8.2-RELEASE FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE #0: Fri Feb 18 02:24:46 UTC 2011    root@almeida.cse.buffalo.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  i386

@nfisher:

. . . am still getting that error over and over again: dhcpd: parse_option_buffer: malformed option vendor-class. <unknown>(code 1027): code tag at end of buffer - missing length field</unknown>. I don't care so much though as long as it stays up.

Suggestion: on a console or SSH session to pfSense, give the shell command # tcpdump -i IF -c 10 -e -vvv udp port 67 (replace IF by the FreeBSD name of the interface with the DHCP server). This should provide at least the MAC address of the system(s) sending the offending message.

never mind… found the answer

it's normal

the embedded has no video output / keyboard input

only COM serial

Just about anything will cope with that bandwidth and Squid+SquidGuard, as long as you've got something with a 1 GHz+ processor and 1 GB+ of RAM you'll be fine with that. I'd a 1 GHz Via box with 512 MB of RAM and it handled Squid+SquidGuard on a 20 Mb/s link with room to spare (the main problem being the RealTek NICs).

However, Snort will have a bigger impact, how much being determined by how you configure it and what rules you load. I've seen 3.2 GHz Xeon's brought to their knees on ~20 Mb/s links and lower spec systems having no problems on 100 Mb/s+ - all down to how Snort is set up.

You probably want to look to 2 GB (or more) of RAM and as high a processor spec as you can justify - multi core being better than single core if you're wanting to run Snort and everything else.

Sounds like a faulty ground or perhaps you have a short or a miswired electrical outlet that's giving you a hot ground.

If you have a specific NIC that isn't being detected, then it's either a hardware issue (the card itself, your motherboard's PCI <whatever>bus, etc), or a driver issue (less likely if they are identical).

There is no limit to the number of NICs pfSense will detect and use, only the limitation of your hardware. With VLANs and such you can get up into the hundreds or thousands of interfaces. The GUI doesn't look so pretty then in some areas, but it works.</whatever>

I hard a 200 plus foot run using realtek, intel, broadcom and a few different other nics.  I had issues until, I did one thing.  I took a managed switch created two vlans.  I plugged the external cable into the vlan1 with the firewall.  From the I connected my firewall internal vlan went out to the rest of the internal vlan. no issues from there.
RC