Zani: I suspect you will have to arrange support (or do it yourself) for the writing of a FreeBSD device driver for the USB ADSL modem. This could be quite difficult if suitable specifications for the modem are not readily available.

It would likely be more cost effective (and much quicker) to replace your laptop by something more suitable.

An alternative might be to use a VLAN capable switch as a "port multiplier" for your laptop, effectively giving you more NICs. This would depend on the laptop NIC being "VLAN capable".

The specs on the web page you pointed to say the NICs are Intel 82583V. I couldn't see these mentioned in the supported hardware list for FreeBSD 8.1.

Take care! It might be a while before the NICs are supported in pfSense. Otherwise it looks a nice box.

I wanted to update this for future members that need help choosing hardware. I have everything but the wireless card running on 1.2.3 and its running flawlessly.
Thanks again for all your help.

@jimp:

You couldn't pay me enough to put a DSL or cable modem inside of a nice (read: expensive) router. It's far, far too easy for a power surge to fry the CPE, and velcro/zip ties/screws are cheap. :-)

Ditto.  The broadband endpoint (DSL/Cable) is one thing I would WANT to be separate.

thanks for your reply,

I will go for this board and I will report back when I receive it.

/Niklas

i tried the method that CaseyBlackburn give and it works.
thank you all .

For over two years now I have had pfSense (full install) running off a Transcend 1GB DOM (Disk On Module) which is flash memory (completely quiet, no heat I can detect with my fingers) on a IDE connector to plug into the motherboard IDE socket. Its been designed to act as a disk replacement (so may well give better life than flash drives for applications that do only occasional writes). From memory, the cost was a bit over 10 euros. My system has enough memory to not swap.

From what other people have written in the forums I expect you would get reasonable life out a Compact Flash card (and IDE adapter) running the full version of pfSense provided you didn't swap a lot or run packages that do a lot of disk writes (e.g. web cache).

For the price of flash drives currently I suspect you could easily get a couple of 4GB drives, install on one, use it as your boot drive and take a physical copy to the other drive which you could put aside as a spare in the case the install drive dies. If you don't do too many writes to the drive you could well get a good length of service from it. And it it dies, you can instantly replace it with your spare.

Squid couldn't be the cause since the package has not been installed on this system yet.

There should be. I've made a couple commits today which should have triggered a new build. It takes ~6hrs for a full builder run, give or take, so there will probably be one in the next few hours.

It would have to be using the majority of the RAM for the video if it drops the usable RAM from 512 to under 123 MB (the limit for that 128 MB error). Check the system logs after booting to see how much memory is shown.

What com port settings are you using?
Often the com settings are different for the bios output hence as soon as the POST finishes and pfsense starts to boot the com port settings change and output becomes garbled.
You need 9600 8,n,1 to see the pfsense ouput.

Steve

It was recommended to do this under FreeBSD 7 as it doesn't differentiate between HT and real cores.  Supposedly 2.0 on FreeBSD 8 will correctly do this as it was added to FreeBSD 8.

I have a system with a Gigabyte GN-WPKG card which is controlled by the ral driver. I'm running build

2.0-BETA3
built on Mon Jul 12 19:11:41 EDT 2010
FreeBSD 8.1-RC1

The card is described as

ral0: <ralink technology="" rt2560="">mem 0xef000000-0xef001fff irq 7 at device 8.0 on pci0
ral0: MAC/BBP RT2560 (rev 0x04), RF RT2525
ral0: [ITHREAD]</ralink>

in the startup output.

The log shows seven instances of

ral0: need multicast update callback

.

I can see signal from this card on all four laptops in the house. I'm using WPA2 encryption, Pre Shared Key and WPA Pairwise = AES.

What's different about your system and card? Is the WLAN configured as an Access Point?

@stramato:

However, I am still able to access pfSense Web Configurator by typing 192.168.1.1 on my browser. Is this normal?

It's probably because you have firewall rules allowing cross VLAN traffic. It's also could just be because it's another IP on the pfSense box and so it's just automatically allowed.

Soekris engineering have a PCI and a mini-PCI card:

Soekris Engineering vpn1401 and vpn1411

;)

I don't see the need for the second switch on the second pfsense, unless you plan on adding vlans.

In fact, you could, technically, run your public wifi subnet through the first pfsense box via the first vlan switch. Each vlan acts like a physical network with its own gateway on pfsense. You may, however, have other reasons for wanting to separate the wifi network totally, such as physical separation from the first network, or load limits on pfsense 1.

HTTP from DMZ –-> LAN yields approx 2.4MB/s. Still nowhere near 80Mb/s line speed..

I'll get some dumps later this week and see how I get on..

If the Netgear doesn't give you the options you need with the standard firmware you could always try a different one such Routertech (www.routertech.org) or Openwrt (www.openwrt.org). You might end up bricking it though.  ::)

Steve

If you can find one with Atheros or Ralink chipset it should be OK.

I don't know the model but at one point I had a Linksys card that was really a Ralink card and it seemed OK as an AP, though I didn't use it for anything more than testing.