There are "CF"-cards which have about the same read/write cycles as harddisks - so called solid state disks.

There are a little more expensive than normal CF cards but I think they would work.

On the other hand, probably a normal CF card would work to, as official write cycles are usually very conservative calculated (probably they do 100x or 1000x more cycles).

you were right, i was not using the correct cable
problem fixed, thx :)

Great,  Thanks!  ;D

Locking this thread since it's a mess.

For those who come across this in the future, the fix for ALIX boot failures is to make sure your BIOS is up to date. If you're running the latest BIOS and having problems, please start a new thread specific to the problem you are seeing.  Thanks

thank you very much for your help - now it works  :)
i now did a bios update and disabled really all hardware, that is not needed (e.g. USB support)
its great that i am now able to use the pfsense on that hardware instead of some linux firewall,
because only pfsense supports features like CARP and pfsync
so it seams to be an IRQ issue
thanks again,

malcom

Most likely a bug.  If you have an extra drive and or MB it would be most helpful if you could send it to the SATA driver maintainer for FreeBSD (Søren).    http://people.freebsd.org/~sos/

There's a few (dozen) threads around on a similar theme - the whole point of pfSense is to be a firewall/gateway, not a general purpose server.  There are plenty of solutions out there for general purpose servers ;)

I didn't go looking in any depth - I don't have one and have no personal interest in whether or not it works with FreeBSD/pfSense ;)

As for the cards, you want to buy the server cards if you can - there is a world of difference between the server grade cards and the desktop cards in terms of system load.

When you see "The operating system has halted." it is safe to power off the box. However like stated above the file system is mounted read only so even if you pulled the plug when it was running it shouldn't matter.

Not sure why you would want to shut it down remotely unless you have it connected to a power strip that you can remotely turn it back on. Otherwise once its shut down its not going to start back up again.

I only have three ports connected but all four are detected.

I had the same problem as jhereg - was able to fix it by loading the 'highmem' driver under freedos.  Flashing the .99 bios to my Alix the worked flawless after that.

You're really talking mystically.

What did you get working (mf'rer, type) and how did you do it.
THAT knowledge could help others.

Something is definitely funky with the lan1621 cards - I just tried it in a d201gly mainboard and it crashed on boot.  I took a picture of the crash, and then replaced the card with a davicom chipset based card and it booted fine.

I have a couple of lan1621 cards so I'll try another, but if anyone else has one and can share with me that it works for them, I'd appreciate it.

@razor2000:

….

So basically, it is going at close to 100 mbit wirespeed.... Amazing!
....

i wonder how you managed to get such good speed.

i'm using my pfsense (1.2-rc4) at a vdsl line (50/10mbit) and can't get more than ~2MB/s downstream… as soon as i remove the pfsense i get 4,7MB/s

my setup is the following:
vdsl-modem -> isp-router -> 1st lan -> pfsense -> 2nd lan

any hints how i could improve my speed?

@dotdash:

Just a wild hunch. I had an issue with the PIC on a machine not liking RC3+ uniprocessor kernels. Similar symptoms. A re-install will prompt for the kernel, or you could mount the CD, backup the kernel, and copy the kernel_SMP.gz off the CD to /boot/kernel/kernel.gz

I tried that, but it didn't help.  Turned out the problem was more mundane.  The 2U case needs a PCI riser card to enable a PCI card to be plugged into it.  Turns out the way the card sat in the riser, parts of the riser card weren't making good contact with the PCI slot on the motherboard.  I swapped the riser card with one that was "taller", and now it works just fine.  Weird that the card initialized at all.

The intel card is very fast…  I'm glad I got I got it, but am kicking myself for not making sure the riser could seat properly first.

Thanks for the help!

For small I was thinking of the fit-pc http://www.fit-pc.com

Running embedded from CF Card.  Started with RC4.

ok thx i ordered it hopeing for the best.
The chipset are supported. but that doesn´t garantee it will work does it?

Edit : It worked perfect!

@Cry:

Version of pfSense?

1.0.1
built on Sun Oct 29 01:07:16 UTC 2006