@netphreak You are right, but building up a pfsense in a VM on a normal desktop PC with Core 2 Duo will give you a hint how fast it could be on you new hardware ;-) As far as I know the pfsense firewall isn't able to use multicore BUT if you run other services like squid or OpenVPN then these services will use the other free cores/threads. -edit- Take a look at this thread perhaps: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,35669.0.html

Luder… You could always setup a test box and see how it goes... even perhaps on lesser hardware to get your feet wet... I am in agreement with Tommyboy about the network setup posted also. If you have a good basic design with a quality switch and Intel cards you should be able to do this easily. Reading some of the threads here and seeing people who are scaling PFS in larger environments your setup here should be no issue. H.

The FlexATX board will fit into any case that would fit a MicroATX board.  It's like a slightly longer version of the MiniATX standard (or shorter M-ATX for that matter). If your case would support a Full ATX board, you can fit the FlexATX board in it.

If you haven't already I'd highly recommend you look at the threads in this forum. There you'll find many other people's experiences of particular hardware, including rackmount hardware. You'll also want to review the hardware compatibility list linked from the pfSense home page.

I'd be interested in any results you get. There have recently been some posts showing that you should be able to get a far higher throughput on an Atom board. However the actual throughput seems often limited by the NIC/driver. My own testing showed my box may be capable of 650Mbps (with a 1.5GHz Pentium-M) however it is almost certainly limited by it's Marvell NICs and inefficiencies in it's driver. Recent updates to the driver in OpenBSD have showed huge improvements. Use Intel NICs if you want high throughput!   ;) Steve

Oh yes I had only recently installed the open VM tools package and hadn't restarted the VMs since then. I'll do some testing tot ry and isolate it and if it is causing issues I'll recommend to unpublish from the package list until its reliable.

You actually have a lot of option with that Mac Pro. Since it's Intel based you can install Windows, Linux, Pfsense, Vmware ESXi or OSX on it. You could also try to sell it as Mac tend to hold their value better, so it should still be worth a decent amount. For your internet connection you're not going to need a whole lot of CPU power to keep up. You could use a P4 box with 2GB of ram in it and have more than enough power to run PFSense. http://www.pfsense.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=52&Itemid=49 The thing to keep in mind is that a lot of your SMB devices are really only being powered by a single core CPU that is 1ghz or less. Most desktop computers have much faster processors in them. If you have another pc with any type of dual core or say a P4 you could use that to build a PFSense box. Then you could just go back to regular OSX for your multimedia needs.

@beafool: If you are using USB keyboard, did you try another model of keyboard?  The installation for my Dell T110 only work when using the keyboard come with it.  It DOES NOT work and hang in 3X% when using Dell Desktop keyboard or one model of MS brand keyboard.  I had no idea why. I used only the keyboard that came with it. Will test some more and also try other keyboards to see if that changes anything.

im going to go ahead i order the board i listed. hope it all works.  ;) Thanks again for the support.

What does the console or logs show when you connect it? Looking at the source for the u3g driver, here, it looks like the 305 isn't supported yet. Steve Edit: Though it is listed here.

802.11-N support is right on the bleeding edge of development. If you read through the FreeBSD mailing lists or forum you'll see some people do have it working. However I'm yet to see anyone here at the pfSense forum successfully running it. You'd have to compile your own drivers and copy them across, it wouldn't be easy!  ::) There are some cheaper dual lan atom boards available. Just use an old Watchguard Firebox and spend the money you saved on electricity. Steve

My bad.. Originally it had a 1.2.3 cd installation, later updated to 2.0rc1 and after that to latest 2.0 snapshot (current state)

Why not try and push it on a VM Pfsense where you can adjust settings on the hardware fairly easy. Monitor the bottlenecks very closely on the Vm and see how far you can push it?

That looks like the Asus motherboard will work. Just need to find an adapter or just put a hard drive in place of the CF adapter.

Well you can try my suggestion above without having to do any hardware mods. Another possibility is to copy your config.xml file from your cf card onto your hd before you install it. Yet another option would be to do what I did for bios access on the x-peak box which has no pci slot so vga console is not possible. See the x-peak thread for that adventure. However I'm not sure you need bios access on the x-core box, reading through the first pages of the thread it looks as though it should boot from a hd without changes. Steve

@jimp: Looks like it isn't supported by any of the drivers we currently have. Probably the chip is too new. In pfSense 2.0 snapshot builds the RT3070 is supported by the run driver. The run driver is not present in pfSense 1.2.3 and its probably a non-trivial task to backport the run driver from 2.0 to 1.2.3 because the USB stack is different.

I've done this in the past with a dual P3 box (only one was used by pfSense at the time) and it would route 10 Mbit with low CPU utilization (5% from memory.  ) This time around I went with a netgate appliance.  This one, actually:  http://store.netgate.com/Netgate-Hamakua-1U-P229C84.aspx Solid state, rack mount, the Celeron processor has enough oomph to do everything I need to do, and 4 gigabit ports plus the 100 Mbit WAN port give enough flexibility to separate out all my networks without resorting to VLANs.  All I can say so far is that it doesn't appear to get hot – I'm still in the process of getting my new colo space up and running and can't give more thoughts than that. I have no idea how the price compares to building your own, though; with a failover pair the increased reliability one would expect from solid state is less of a benefit as well.