According to the Soekris "Downloads" page, there is a new version of the ComBIOS for the Net5501;

http://www.soekris.com/downloads.htm

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Currently available BIOS Files for net5501:

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b5501_132i.bin          net5501 BIOS release version 1.32i
...

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http://www.soekris.com/Software/changelog.txt

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"comBIOS vers 1.32i

* fixed PCI config byte/word write handling (IDE DMA enable)"

...

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I have yet to try this new ComBIOS version with a harddrive.

Whew - with that requirement (quad-gigabit boards) you probably will be limited to PCI-e interface cards to get the full bandwidth, otherwise you will definitely not make wire-speed…

Just an observation...

gm...

@cmb:

You shouldn't be seeing this anymore. It used to happen under certain circumstances, but nobody has reported it in any 1.2 versions. It's not an issue of the file system, the file system fsck's at boot if it wasn't properly unmounted and will recover itself just fine.

Could you boot the system off the live CD next time this happens, fsck and mount the file system, and scp the broken config.xml off the box, then send it to me? If you'll do that, I'll provide more detailed info on what needs to be done.

In a linux box I really could do that without problem; I'm new in bsd systems and am trying to know the system commands that are similar in linux in order to try to fix when something bad happens; to tell you the truth, I really didnt remembered that I could mount the filesystem using a live CD and fsck it; In the last time it happened, I reinstalled the system using one earlyer version (1.2rc2) and changed my UPS (the last one wasnt working properly, breaking the energy supply for the pf box) and hope, it will never (at least for ups reasons) will happen again; but if it does, then I may try to copy some config.xml for you!

I'm trying to read a little about bsd, in the future it will be easyer to me to help you with this!

thanks again!

srs

Ok, thank you

Thanks,

Mark

If you do decide to use CF cards for such applications be SURE to have as much RAM as possible so you don't do much, if any, disk swaps!

Also - be sure the CF devices have physical to logical addressing with algorithms that "rotate" the free space use of the memory elements within the device.  Earlier (and some less "expensive" CF devices) do not have such algorithms so will write over and over to the same memory elements - since the memory elements have relatively short re-write ability the device will stop working properly over a relatively short period of time.  This is the "down-side" to CF devices.

Just some observations…

gm...

Just wanted to give an update…

I haven't had time to do any more testing yet, but it's been up and running for 3 weeks now. The new boards are soooo much faster than the old 266 MHz boards. Here's my throughput testing on them. I'll try to get to some more testing on these new boards soon. I'm hoping they will at least double the throughput.

http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,1869.msg10687.html#msg10687

sorry about that, we only have g2's and newer so this was new info for me..

SMP ;-) or your processor will send emails all around the world :-D

Paranoia is good  ;D

Be aware though that the tools are only as good as their configuration.  A default install of, say, snort won't really help you - you need to take the time to tune and configure them appropriately for your environment.

On the other side, if you need redundancy and you have multiple WAN IPs then I'd suggest you consider a second host as a fallback.  Ideally it should be identically configured to the first and then you can use CARP (see the CARP sub-forum).

pfSense-Forum –> Wireless --> Sticky: What is a good Wireless NIC:
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,3246.0.html

Or take a look at the supported hardware list:
pfSense-Forum --> Wireless --> Sticky: Supported Hardware for pfSense/FreeBSD (HCL)
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,25.0.html

@sjitan:

Can I do a full installation of pfsense on solid state disks like this one
http://ec.transcendusa.com/product/ItemDetail.asp?ItemID=TS8GSSD25-S

Regards,
Sherif

Yep - I have an ALIX board from pc-engines that I connected a CD-Rom to (the ALIX.1C… http://www.pcengines.ch/alix1c.htm ) through the 44-pin IDE port on the card, installed the 8-gig CF flash card in the CF holder then booted up the system and used the installed on the pfsense CD to install the system directly to the CF card.

gm...

@redbeard:

It runs off of a CF card though, so you can't run packages without some extra steps.

In that case you could use a Microdrive instead - that's how mine runs

@onhel:

If you're going to be running packages, like Snort and Squid, you're going to have to bump the RAM up to at least a gig.

With Squid, Nut, Imspector, pfflowd, FreeRadius, dnsmasq, dhcpd, miniupnpd, racoon and OpenVPN all running I've not quite used 256 MB of the 512 MB of RAM I've got installed - Snort's the real memory hog.

Of course, I'd agree that more memory (and more CPU power) is generally good.