It feels like I've been searching for this exact board for years, but I can never find it.  Yes, you got a good (and rare) choice for pfSense.

If you can source any more, PM me.  :)

yes. i appologize, i posted this thread when i was still trying to use pfsense 1.2-stable….the driver in that version didn't work at all
when i downloaded 1.2.3 i decided to make my post in that forum instead, seeing as it seemed to be an issue with that version (being based on freebsd 7.1)

@GruensFroeschli:

Have you tried this NIC with "real" load and not just for homeuse where it doesnt matter if you're limited to 10Mbit/s?
;)

I have not   :( I guess its only good for small use.

Generally all motherboard based "hardware" RAID is software RAID (aka "fake-RAID" or "HostRAID").  It's only if you get into the server boards that you'll find real hardware RAID.  Indeed, as a rule of thumb if you spent under $200 on the RAID card itself then it's most likely a software RAID unit.

Yeah it seems mine doesn't have any GB networking at all, the specs says "Ethernet, Fast Ethernet".
So maybe both built in NICs are the 6107, and since at least one of them work in OpenBSD I guess both should work in pfsense….if both really are the same chip. Maybe the other one is some old 10Mb crap since it says both ethernet and fast ethernet :s

i got dynamanic ip address at the moment. and i wondering to change to static ip so my ip address never changes. do you think my problem will solve then?

For what it's worth, I had an identical experience with my ALIX 3D2.

By default, the BIOS baud rate is at 38400.  I set minicom to 38400, and fired it up.  When the machine POST-ed, I typed "S" to enter the BIOS setup.  I set the BIOS baud rate to 9600 so that it would match the BSD default (at least that's my understanding of the default).  I saved the settings.  Then I reset the minicom baud rate and power cycled the ALIX.  The BIOS test was readable but I got exactly the same double characters until the kernel loaded and started booting.  Then the double character anomaly was gone.  So the double character business seems isolated to the boot loader.  Does anyone know why this might be happening?  Thanks in advance

@bob76535:

I haven't messed with squid yet. Can it be set to proxy some sites and not proxy others? I don't want it to cache the sites we work on as the users are constantly changing them and need to see the changes immediately. I would need to set it to skip our entire IP range (254 addresses). As long as that wasn't a problem, that sound like a good plan.

I had read elsewhere that the processor speed was not really important with pfsense but bus speed and memory speed was important. Is that not true?

Thanks

Bob

Yes, and even with squid they could see changes immediatly.

Dont know about the memory bus speed, many of us are running with Pentium 3 -level stuff. As am I for example, an old isp1100 with two intel network cards and P3 750MHz. 1Gb of ram and its running good and fast, even with squid on it.

I was able to fix it by one of two things.
Forcing the NIC to 100mbps seemed to work okay. It would flake sometimes. And using a 100mbps NIC also works, which seems to work the best out of the two solutions.

I don't think its an issue with pfsense, its the modem that doesn't play nice with the card. Thank you for your help.

I can't see any reason why it wouldn't work. However I have no experience with that board so can't say it will work. (I  suspect its pretty new and new stuff sometimes needs some driver tweaks before it will work.)

If you are looking for a mini-ITX dual LAN board that someone has found to work with pfSense search the forums for some positive reports on a MSI board. I think its model number begins with IM.

I think "disconnect" effect is solved for me. I had it when I connect some clients directly to lan of pfsense or switch was problematic (after replace no problems). I am now playing width 1.2.2 but whenever I play width traffic shaper wizard I have xfiles in some points. It wasn't like this in 1.2.0 at least for my systems.

Thanks for your reaction, Cry Havok. I've searched, found and read your earlier comment, but it doesn't speak about the 8139D. I've sold some systems that are suited for using pfsense, untill now only with Intel NIC's. Realtek isn't perfect for me either. But the most basic idea of network adapters is: do they work without errors? The Realtek 8139D NIC's I'm testing are working without errors. The price difference between Intel one 1000GT and a one Realtek NIC is approximately $24/€19 (In the Netherlands). For a lot of people that makes the difference between a pfsense-based firewall and, lets say, a cheap Linksys router with embedded firewall. But I agree that for maximum performance the only solution is an adapter with Intel chipset.

Had similar issues myself, I recently replaced my old T22 Thinkpad laptop that was running PFSense 1.2, with the new 2.0 Alpha release on a faster T23 laptop.  They have onboard Intel NICs, and on the T23 I tried using a 3COM 656 cardbus…it was working, but sporadic disconnect issues.  I yanked it, slapped in a DLink PCMCIA NIC...reset PFSense to use it..and all is good.

Just the one install (home FW)
I got everything put together.  Found a spare 256MB card and loaded it on that.
Restored my current pfsense config onto it and it took it fine (it was one rev before the embedded version that I just installed)

I'm up and running!  Love it!

@g4m3c4ck:

@Seth:

Can anybody say AirPort Express.

I would love a device that I could load pfSense on that would be a direct replacement for an AirPort Express.

Good point! I found this little guy right  here http://www.slashgear.com/toradex-robin-atom-cpu-on-credit-card-sized-mainboard-2735953 that make me ponder what else I could use it for  ;D

The cost of the device is double what's listed on slashgear as you need the carrier board to actually make it do anything.  At that price, a cheap much faster PC is a better option.

–Bill

I've got a couple jetway systems.  I love them.  infact, they make a mini-itx that takes a 4 nic daughter board that's pretty cool too.  I've never had a problem with jetway products but i have a friend who received a DOA board…he just returned it and hasn't had a problem since.  That happens with ALL manufacturers though.

hm, it seems i have mixed up my machines and posted dmesg from smp kernel machine. but as i was about to check it on the second machine with uniprocessor kernel, it was not able to recognize the onboard realtek nic just like when runinng with smp kernel (same re0: PHY write failed errors)

i tried a little bit of googling and found out it is known problem with freebsd 7.0 and 7.1. so i dont know this is the proper place to ask for support regarding bsd kernels, but maybe some kernel dev is around here and willing to help.

ECC is more for hardware reliability - a standard PC with non ECC memory might blue screen if memory is corrupted but a server with ECC memory will detect a single bit error and correct it. In the old days a server with ECC memory would still blue screen (windows) on a double bit fault where as now-adays the DIMM will more likely be marked off-line.