Disabling the RAID made no difference.

Also, I was too optimistic with my analysis.  Even though the system came up fine after installing the NIC cards, as soon as I started configuring it via the web interface, things got wacky.  After each change I would lose access to the web interface.  I could still ping the firewall and the console was still OK.  But, even restarting the webconfigurator from the console would not bring access to the web gui back.  I had to fully reboot the server.

I think I'll start up a new thread that references this thread.  Since this one is getting long winded, I want to post a summary of my issues and what my options are moving forward.

@Guldan:

Appreciate the response. How would it act as a router with only one NIC? would I need to use wifi to bridge connections?

Most mini-ITX motherboards I have seen have at least one NIC on the motherboard and one PCI or PCI-Express expansion slot. By using the expansion slot you can have two NICs. Some mini-ITX motherboards have a mini-PCI or mini-PCI-Express slot which could be used for a wireless NIC. Alternatively, a USB socket could be used to provide for a wireless NIC.

Suppose you want to enhance the box by adding a separate LAN for servers accessible from the public Internet. You can't put any more NICs in the box (except possibly USB NICs and a number of people have reported unsatisfactory experiences with USB NICs) so you could use a VLAN capable switch to get more wired interfaces. If I recall correctly, Wikipedia has an informative article on VLANs.

I have a mini-ITX box as my pfSense router. It has a Jetway motherboard with one NIC, a one NIC daughter card, a PCI wireless card. I use VLANs over the NIC in the daughter card and a VLAN capable switch to get two virtual interfaces over the one physical interface: one for WAN and one for OPT1 to a server accessible from the Internet. I was using a USB NIC but that was often not recognised on startup so the startup needed manual intervention to complete. That drove me to the VLAN solution and getting rid of the USB NIC.

can you please give me a link that show how to configure the AWUS036H as AP?

Which PFsense version supports AWUS036H ?

Yeah I went ahead and purchased a new card.  The card/system in question is a 1GB CF card in an Alix box.  It's still trying to finish updating packages after an update from nearly 20 hours ago.  Still nothing in the logs or dmesg though.  And the CPU is nearly idle.

last pid: 24993;  load averages:  0.00,  0.00,  0.00    up 0+20:01:12  18:31:05 42 processes:  1 running, 41 sleeping CPU:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  0.4% system,  0.4% interrupt, 99.2% idle Mem: 37M Active, 71M Inact, 42M Wired, 34M Buf, 85M Free

I confirm too that this board rocks … I have it running 2.0 RC1 with 8GB Kingston SSD Drive (40$) and 1GB of RAM. This thing is fast, saving and reloading the config is fast... Myself I have a Soekris net5501 with a CF and mine is sooo sloooow... I'm jealous of my friend router now... ;-)

MageMinds

Ok thanks !

Next problem with this card (shame because it fits the Super micro Atom 1U case) is the driver…...igb(4)

As far as i can see ALTQ does not support this driver. Thats a problem i think

I understand.

No serial port on the computer. therefore wanted to use USB to RS232 converter.
I must find another formula

The Netgear and RB switches are recommended for low cost VLAN usage.  Your HP switch supports VLAN trunks and you should be able to use it just fine unless you do not have enough physical ports.
You will need 3 physical ports for the pfSense unit, 1 for the router VLAN trunk, 1 for LAN and one for WAN.  The APs will use the other 5 ports and run through the VLAN trunk where required.

The SMC NIC uses a RTL8139 Fast Eth. chipset.  I would hardly recommend this.  Pick up a cheap Intel PCI-X Gigabit NIC from eBay instead.  Saves you lots of grief from chipset/ driver related troubles in the long run and they're available for a song.

@RamGuy:

But they all seem to utilize the Realtek 8111E NIC which isn't supported? Optional I could simply go for a dual-NIC Intel Pro/1000 NIC but they are priced rather silly here in Norway and the PCI-Express editions aren't supported anyway?

The Intel PT series PCIe cards are supported by pfsense 2.0.  You can even get the cheaper CT series PCIe x1 NICs which will also work under pfsense 2.0.  The former can be bought off eBay though they aren't exactly cheap.

My mbla3200 cards do not work with pfsense past 1.2.3.

You can google Xircom 3201 (which i believe is the controller for these cards) and will see my threads on this issue.  Evidently freebsd stopped supporting them at some point, and I have never been able to get them to work on 2.0.  Tried with the latest RC and it was the same thing.  Found this thread looking to see if its fixed.

No, it isn't supported.  Support is included in FreeBSD 8.2, so it might make it into pfSense 2.1.

thanks cmb!
would crypto card help to unload the cpu or is it just a waste of money?
what about linitx FX5622, is it any good?

update
found network appliance with intel celeron 440 2ghz, 1gb ram and 6 giga ports on Intel 82574 controller. bit over my budget but should do the trick

@dreamslacker:

… For regular traffic shaping and NAT, it's more than sufficient for 100mbps though.

It was a P4/2.2 after all.  And it pushed 100mb just fine like you said:

Now I have the dreaded "CPU0: local APIC error 0x40," but that's a different story …

I think I found my answer at

http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/ALTQ_drivers

TJ

CF all the way, no moving parts - less noise as well.

TJ

You would be best reading the Watchguard X700 thread here, all 24 pages of it!

The X500, X700, X1000 and X2500 are all identical hardware.

People have used CF and HD but CF is easier as there's no mounting hardware for a HD. There isn't a graphics card onboard, but there is a PCI slot if you have a card, so most people use serial.

The front ports are individual Realtek NICs.

They all have crypto hardware, mostly SafeNet SafeXcel-1141 which is supported by FreeBSD but there are mixed reports of actually getting it working.

Check on Ebay for the more recent X550e or X750e or the much rarer X5000, X6000 or X8000. All great hardware.

Steve

I picked up something really basic, some Atheros based card I think, whatever Titan Wireless was selling. I was pretty much able to get the full kit from Titan, I think.

@mhab12:

I was under the impression that the newer Intel cards (E1G44HTBLK) were supported in 2.0 as it was based on FreeBSD 8?

The 8.0 (and 8.1/8.2) HCL says 82576 is the newest supported.  That might not be accurate though.

@lifespeed:

@jasonlitka:

3. Unless you have a reason to push LAN-LAN traffic through pfSense, you're better off just using a switch.

I would likely apply QoS based on DSCP tags to LAN-LAN as well as WAN-LAN traffic for a mixed voice/data network.  Can you be more specific about why I would not want LAN traffic going through pfsense?

Because any traffic that is LAN-LAN will seriously drag down your system.  It takes a LOT of power to push 1000Mbit/s through a box.  You're better off using vLANs and an L3 switch to keep your local voice & data traffic separate.  Keep the pfSense box out of the way so it only has to deal with LAN-WAN traffic.