It's been around for a little while.  They have been working a vitrualization build for XenServer.  It a common issue, like the clock running backwards and stuff.  They have been working for a while.

I know when they get it straight it will be awesome to have XEN build that is geared for Xen Server virtualization.
RC

This is the hardware beginning to fail.  There's a very good chance that your drive is going bad.  Lockups are almost always hardware related and the DMA timeouts are a good indication that the drive is going south.

have you configured your switch for the same vlan config as pfsense? the port on the switch that your client is on needs to be in the same vlan as the one you want it to access. You will also need to configure the pfsense lan port on the switch for trunking so that the interface can see packets from both the lan and vlan.

have you done this yet?

The one thing that concerns me with the model with the LCM is if it will work with LCDproc. I've looked into several devices like this and tested a lot of them personally. In just about all cases, pfSense needed additional work outside of gui config to get LCDproc working.

I've been working on the same idea as you for several months and the biggest hurtle I've had is getting the LCM to work correctly.

Yes if you can boot the live cd without problem you should be ok. How much bandwidth are you planning to push? Depending on that you might be better off with an Intel NIC since they usually are the most reliable. Although Broadcom NICs dont seem to have much problems wih FreeBSD either. Did you check the link i provided if this NIC is supported?

Here are a few options I would try. I have no idea if any of these would work on that particular piece of hardware.

Ask the seller how they did it and repeat.

Temporarily connect an IDE CD-ROM and boot from that.

Connect an external USB attached CD-ROM drive and boot from that.

Install on an IDE drive on another system, remove the drive and put it in the Nexgate and boot.

I have a mini-ITX board with VIA C3 CPU and CLE-266 chipset. The PCI slot holds a TP-LINK TL-WN651G wireless NIC which uses the Atheros chipset which is well regarded, supported by FreeBSD/pfSense and has given good service for over 16 months.

There are quite a few different brands of Wireless NIC that use a supported Atheros chipset. However be aware that some brands (Linksys, Netgear and DLink among them) change the chipset without changing the model number. For example, the DLink DWL-G630 might use a Marvell chipset (unsupported by FreeBSD/pfSense) or a TI Chipset (unsupported by FreeBSD/pfSense) or an Atheros chipset (supported by FreeBSD/pfSense) or a Ralink chipset (supported by FreeBSD/pfSense). One of the factors in my choice of a TP-LINK card was that they seem to change the model number when they change the chipset, making it easier to know what you are buying.

I have found http://linux-wless.passys.nl helpful in determining what chipset is used in particular products even though that site is focused on Linux. I know of no comparable site with a FreeBSD focus.

I'd suggest you use the search function.  This has been discussed many times, particularly in the Hardware forum.

@cheesyboofs:

As wallabybob & Cry Havok said this has been discussed at length, here is a good start.

http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,13098.15.html
And
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,11913.0.html

The main thing to look out for on mini-itx boards are that they usually come with cheep Realtek NIC's, take my advice and spend a little extra and get one with Intel GB NIC's, this is the one I've been running for a while now.
http://www.icp-uk.com/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=416
Then if you need extra network connectivity buy a cheap VLAN switch as I have, again covered in the post above.

At the end of the day only you can decide what will meet your needs, no one is going to say "ear mate buy one of these" as all you will do is say Oh that too expensive, or they don't sell that here in Greece.

Excellent! I will try to investigate further with all your help and advice. I will now more confortable with the idea of having an mini-itx system for PF.
Thanks again!

Thanks ! good idea … I have a WRT54G with DD-WRT I will try using VLAN ..

If you aren't tied to using mini-ITX, there are a few other systems you can use that are fully supported.  I've been using a Lanner FW7520 with great success.  Other have used the FabiaTech FX5620 or FX5621.  Depending on your exact bandwidth and processing needs, a Soekris Engineering system might be a good fit.

Atheros based PCI wireless NICs are well regarded. I have used the TP LINK TL-WN651G for over 15 months and its given very good service.

That's when they hope to get 8.0 out - it may be later.  After that it's still a matter of whether or not pfSense 2.0 uses 8.0 as the base.  This seems likely, but not certain, and even if it does I don't believe that 2.0 will be released in the very near future (though I could be wrong).

That's the point, I really cant turn off my traffic shaper or our students would use 100% of bandwitdh in laboratories.

Do you know any 3com switch that can make pfsense be seen in more than one vlan? or which one would do that and what features do I search in a new switch if I want to buy a new one?? do you know Cisco SRW2024P 24-port?

thanks

If I recall correctly I've seen a few reports of problems with fxp devices over the past few months. (fxp is the Intel 10/100 ethernet.) It might be worth searching the forums for posts over the past 6 months containing fxp to see if anyone has reported something that might be helpful.

Have you tried a pfSense 1.2.3 snapshot build?

@wallabybob:

Have you tried one of the 1.2.3 snapshot builds? Some people have found they work better than earlier builds.

While that may be a generally good suggestion, given the errors this person was seeing, a thorough hardware test would be the first step. DMA errors are never "normal".

Although there are some hardware implementations that clash with drivers, especially some IDE to CF adapters, usually the answer is to disable DMA since it is usually more of a hardware problem than a driver problem.

I booted without problems with 1.2.2 live (I don't recall if the Gb ethernets were working or not, probably not), I also coud install it into a sata 2,5" disk without problems.
After that I upgraded to various snapshots of 1.2.3, with both Gb interfaces detected and being able to use at least one to work.
The problem is that altough the hardware works, I cannot trust it much since all the stress testing I did, failed miserably (specially on the Gb side)

Good luck