you're not the one who decided to rename a third party product with a name that (unsuprisingly) was later used by a different version of the third party's hardware. it's been confusing people for years.
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However, I am having trouble setting it up as an headless unit. It works fine as long as a monitor is attached during startup (first 10-20 seconds), but if no monitor is attached than network doesn't come up. I have tried using display emulators but without any luck.
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I am experiencing something similar here on my DS67U. I doesn't seem to post (after initial power-on) if there is no display connected to the HDMI/DP ports. Any time I reboot (or restore power) on the system, it never gets past the post screen. If I connect a monitor after power on (usually to troubleshoot and see why pfSense hasn't started, sigh), the monitor will immediately go into standby - meaning there is no signal on the monitor output. It's very frustrating, because it means it's impossible to use the computer as in a headless config.
I currently use DS57U, DS67U and DS77U without issues. What is your boot media? Which BIOS and pfSense version? VGA/Serial Console?
In short: I beleive my issues are related to the APU2 BIOS. I've rolled back all but one unit to BIOS V4.0.7. So far, no issues with those routers for the last few days.
Yes, but often they fail due to heat stress. This is because in a firewall they are under load most of the time and airflow and heat dissipation in such an ITX setup is limited. You often are limited by chipset as well, most of them have RealTek chips. A few have (older) Intel chips.
This thread took an interesting turn, thanks for the info.
Regarding APU2 performance, my own testing showed the Bandwidth max was 85.3 Mbits/sec through a TCP OpenVPN connection.
Perhaps a bit slow for the original requirements.
I suspect with the 120Mbit connection you only get 100Mbit, and with OpenVPN overhead you'd lose another 10, so 85.3 Mbits/sec wouldn't be so bad I think.
I shut down the VM, changed the Proxmox CPU emulation from "KVM" to "host", and started it up again. pfSense continued working like nothing had happened. It's working beautifully - and shows the correct CPU details now - an i3 with the AES extension. The rest of the 'hardware' was the same, so there was no need to reassign the interfaces.
At this point I'm still waiting on patches for my Supermicro A1SRi-2758F (Intel® Atom™ Processor C2758) though I don't know if Atom processors are affected.
That generation of Atom is. The earlier/ridiculously slow ones are unaffected.