What kind of slot does you atom have? If it's PCI, you could probably grab a dual 10/100 Intel card from ebay for about $15. You also might want to see if 2.0 handles the realteks better than 1.2.3.

PCI-e :(

Well it has PCI, but it's not accessible inside the case because of the way it's laid out. It's a Supermicro server. Scalability is also a concern for me, at least with a standalone PC I can upgrade whatever is needed, not the case with an Alix board.

A lot of Realtek problems can be solved by disabling various hardware options which are not well supported. A lot of those options are disabled by default in 2.0.

I had to install 1.2.3 as 2.0 wouldn't boot from the CD, I suspect it didn't like my USB CD drive which I found odd considering 1.2.3 booted and installed without issue. I did however upgrade to 2.0 once I got 1.2.3 installed but the NIC problems persist. I get lots of weird stuff like DHCP timeouts and such. Never could pinpoint the real issue other than these Realtek NIC's just not playing nicely. I disabled the hardware checksum offload etc. and it didn't make much of a difference. Could be the VLAN's acting up as well as that seemed to be where most of my problems were occuring.

Think I might deploy a fresh 2.0 install with a dedicated CD-ROM just to see if my problems persist or go away. If not, then I'm still looking at options, may just end up biting the bullet and getting a dual port card or building a mini-itx system from scratch with Intel NIC's… don't want to really spend any money, but I don't think I have any choice :(

hacom.net has some low powered appliances with gigabit nics, but many of them are based on the Atom.

I love my SM X7SPA-HF board. I've have run squid, snort, roardware and site2site openvpn/ipsec… Not alot of traffic as its used for home use. Usally CPU stays at 10% and hitting 40% with heavy torrent downloading while watching netflix... This is over a 50/5 cable connection.  My board is based D510 atom.

If you go with the SM board, look at either the X7SPA-HF-D525 or the X7SPA-H-D525 boards. They are both mini-itx. So you shouldnt have a problem finding a case for it.. I'm currently a M300-LCD as my case.. Only issue i had with the M300 other then getting the LCD display to work was I needed to find a flexible PCIx riser to use the PCIx slot on the board.

Also, if you can spring the extra money, go with the HF instead of the H, it offers IPMI which is really nice. You don't need to hook up a monitor or cd drive... everything thru a web/java interface.

When you restore a config in that situation it will present a screen which asks you to reassign the network interfaces. Just choose the new NIC settings and save/apply, it should reboot and come up. You can then assign/enable/configure the additional NICs as you see fit.

If you move the hdd, you'll get a reassignment prompt on the console. Same idea there, just type in what you want the new NICs to be, and then continue on.

That card is based on the Atheros AR5004G yes?
I'm surprised it isn't supported already but a quick search doesn't show many people using it with FreeBSD. It's quite an old chipset and to be honest if it's not supported already it isn't going to be a priority.

Steve

Edit: A search on this forum shows quite a few people successfully using this card, or at least cards based on the same chipset. (if it is ar5004g)

I'd agree that the 10/100 Realtek cards aren't good (and some define low end), but their Gbit cards are ok (not amazing, but I've had no problems with mine).

I guess this is a issue to move to a 2.0 thread?

Hmm, it appears you're right. See here.
On my box the fan speed can be controlled by the motherboard PWM function which is driven by the SuperIO chip. Although the board has only 3 pin fan connectors the speed adjustment works well. However anything below around 75% pulse width causes the tacho output to fail. The fan still works though.

Steve

The Jetway daughter boards date back to motherboards without PCIe. As far as I know there are no PCIe daughterboards but might be worth checking the Jetway web site or asking their tech support.

I see nothing to suggest that that particular model is supported in FreeBSD. If you plug it into pfSense 2.0, what is logged in the console about the device?

I got a flash card that has no password and it is ready to use.  I can make a ISO and let you have it.  Please contact me.
fastcon1968@gmail.com

I've been reading it back and forth… seems like there were some bugs with the beta version, however what about RC1? Anyone managed to get it done?

@lp:

It's still not shown in dmesg,

Neither ttyu0 not cuau0 appears in my dmesg output but uart0 does.

I'm running pfSense on Atom, no specific issue.
CPU load rarely overcome 10% but ok, my network is not so heavily loaded (VPN, SIP, various servers).
Fact is network stuff are not soooo CPU intensive. Your computer spends time analyzing packets, probably the most complex task perform is encryption (for VPN or SSL handling), and then computing checksums. Besides of that, the task of a network analyzer (which is the biggest part of the firewall) is not really demanding.

Have you seen this thread?

Steve

@Bai:

And I don't have any slots available to add a wireless card to my pfsense box.

There are a couple of Ralink USB wireless LAN chipsets that are supported in FreeBSD and support Access Point mode. I have used the Tenda W311U (pfSense 2.0 RC1 and later) and the TP-LInk TL-WN321G.

@uwedd:

Is there a 802.11g/a card wich you can highly recommend on an Alix board in combination with pfSense?

I guess you are looking for a USB or miniPCI card. I have had satisfactory results (I haven't pushed it hard) from the Tenda W311U USB stick which is supported by the FreeBSD run driver, is wireless N capable and supports Access Point mode. I don't have any other "wireless N" capable equipment so I can't comment on support for "wireless N" speeds or features.

@wallabybob:

@McFuzz:

One 2.0 goes to live - will I be able to update via the GUI rather than reinstall everything?

I have successfully done firmware upgrades from pfSense 1.2.3 to pfSense 2.0. A number of other people have reported similar success. You might need to tweak things a little after the upgrade.

Great! :) Well… hopefully the snapshot server will go back on soon and I'll grab the image and will try it next week.