There are certainly easier platforms you could use! Depends what you're in it for, you could probably learn quite a lot from trying to get that working even if it doesn't work. What NICs are those? If they're not em or igb (Intel) then I'd probably move on to something else. It's almost certainly possible to get it working but it could be challenging. One of those unpopulated headers on the expansion card may well provide a jumper to set the relays. Otherwise it would be a matter of probing in software which is needle/haystack time without any clues to help. Does it still boot the original OS? The bootlog from there may give is a clue. Cymphonix have done it right with that expansion card. Unlike some other devices that look more like something I could have done myself just to get it working. Steve

@Rico Not anything I have access to. There probably are things that have fast enough single thread performance to do it. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html If we assume it scales we could probably guess at what is required... I would expect to need a score there of at least 2200 to get close to 1Gbps using AES-GCM in ideal conditions. Which isn't too wild a requirement. More data needed! Steve

Try geom part list. It looks like mounted slice just isn't any bigger that 2TB. Steve

@DaddyGo thank you very much..... I will first try with a usb vodafone zte 4g modem that i have...maybe less trouble thank you very much. there is no info about this stuff around the net.

@stephenw10 HI, Unless people have an equiped workshop with rework tooks and good SMT skills and the nessasary programmers and code then its not a viable for people to do. Speak with the people who repair your devices at component level they will have certainly come across the problem and know how to resolve it. I've now had quite a lot of people contact me saying that they have a bricked device with the same symtoms we experianced and the serial console regardless to baud rate setting is displaying garbage. It seems its more common than has been talked about. Happy to help anyone who has the nessasary tools and skills to be able to recover their device.

@johnpoz - solid advice!

Does the dashboard now show it running at full speed? Any test where the 2220 is actually running iperf is not a good one. pfSense is not optimised as TCP terminator. Really you need to test through it, with an iperf3 server on one interface and a client on the other. Running iperf3 on the 2220 will itself use a lot of CPU leaving far less for actually moving traffic. Steve

@czar666 We use many pcEngines MOBOs and almost all have different sounds at shutdown and start-up. According to our observations, the sound you hear usually depends on the amount of stopping and starting processes and resource requirements. This small unit is not a power machine and it also depends on processes how long it takes for sound exactly what state you are restarting from. The latest BIOS 4.12.0.1: https://pcengines.github.io/#mr-35 It’s good to hear that you’ve achieved a reassuring result. PS: 4.11.0.6 not recommended "stepping stone" in the BIOS life, for example we did not update to this release. (4.11.0.4 similarly, can cause problems)

@SmokinMoJoe I agree with you, we also use VMware ESXi and Xen hypervisors, but not for pfSense, these are super things, but in my opinion - not at the main front door. (if a hypervisor system dies, a lot of things die with it)

@ColinGill I wish I could remember. I ended up running opnsense on it for a while and I've since switched over to a 1U Supermicro server.

And I use my PCIe 2.0 card in a 1.1 slot. Works fine.

@sremick Glad it's sorted. It wasn't clear (to me) that your system was continuing to boot. I've only ever experienced a similar issue when inadvertently using the wrong installer (VGA instead of serial). I tend to do everything via the console. I still think this is a bit odd that I've had no problems with what appears to be an identical motherboard to yours and have not had to make any alterations at the loader prompt on this system to install pfSense. I've also had no installation issues with another 'generic' J3160 system. If this was a common problem with J3160/N3160 boards then I suspect the forums would be full of Protectli owners with the same issues.

Hmm, yeah always worrying. I would check Status > Interfaces. Make sure you aren't seeing errors/collisions on that port. Could just be a bad cable or connection somewhere. Steve

@stephenw10 Thank you Steve All working perfect!

Possibly spoke a bit too soon there, the expansion card interfaces show up now that the bnxt driver is loaded but as soon as I turned VLANs on at the switch ping, DHCP etc. all stopped working. All sorted now though. I found the solution elsewhere on this forum for another Broadcom NIC. As suggested in that topic I have enabled promiscuous mode on the interface that I have VLANs on. This appears to have resolved the issues although I haven't been testing it for long.

It should be pins 3-4. See step 3 here: https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/solutions/sg-4860-1u/msata-installation.html Steve

@NRgia said in Porting BGE Driver to IFLIB...: Because I don't want to hijack @NollipfSense 's thread anymore I would not worry about it ... I left the thread open for others, such as yourself who may want to attempt the porting ... thank you for contributing!

@StarsAndBars I went with using a quad-core i7 Apple Mac Mini server ... replaced hard drive with SSD mirror and thunderbolt 2 PCI enclosure with an Intel i350 ... easy to upgrade to 10GBe, nice small form factor, low electricity consumption. I must say though that I like and sometimes drool when I see Netgate XG-7100U or desktop.

@dotdash I definately get those same CAM error messages as you indicated. All I do is boot to an existing image, connect the console cable and putty in, drop to shell, and plug in the USB drives. Happens pretty much any time I use a USB 3.0 drive. I've plugged in 3 of them with the same issues. A USB 2 drive that I have doesn't do it.

@bmeeks Thanks B. Waiting for the 2.4.5p1 release to be available to upgrade the CPU cores to 16 again. Hopefully it will solve the problem.