You are correct, the "none" means that no driver attached. We include all supported drivers already. If it doesn't show up even on 2.1, you may have to wait for 2.2.

Of course the argument can go all day long, but my 128GB SSD example was the extreme case for very heavily hit squid caches.  Obviously, a smaller cache and/or one with less heavy read/write cycles would be even less expensive, which probably covers most pfSense installs. By price I went by whatever new hard drives were cheapest on Newegg, I think the cheapest was a 250GB drive, but 500's were cheap too. Obviously, you'll make choices that work for you, my main point was that modern SSD's aren't inherently failure prone for pfSense.

@wallabybob: ssh to the pfSense box, login as admin, select option 8 (shell command) paste the command into the ssh window and copy and paste the command and its output into a reply to this topic OR see http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Executing_command_line_commands_using_the_web_interface Oh yeah, forgot about SSH. Will do!

Damn it, Steve, you're making me look bad… :D   Corrected again. Hahaha.  Doing good.  They were all purchased for Firebox builds, yes, but I ended up using a 2.0ghz chip.

@cmb, tester_02 : thanks for your feedback, it is appreciated. So i conclude that the reliability stays the same almost, but flexibility to upgrade and or try other/new features goes up. thanks

@coyote: I wanted to try out an alix 2d13 board and an older wlan adapter siemens gigaset usb adapter 54. I was happy that I found this wlan adapter on the combatibility list from freebsd 8.1. Unfortunately a number of makers of network change chipsets in their devices without changing the model number. Consequently a support statement might be true of only SOME devices with the same model number. @coyote: The wlan adapter is recognized but it's not shown in pfsense. Any idea? The device has been captured by the "generic USB" driver - there is no specific driver in pfSense for it. It has been recognised as a USB device but not as a wireless networking device. Get yourself a dongle with Ralink RT3070 chipset. The pfSense wireless forum contains a number of reports of successful use of that device and, in some cases, pointers to sellers. Save your current dongle for attempted use with Windows or Linux - you are more likely to be able to find drivers for those operating systems. OR use an external AP. For my modest WiFi requirements I prefer to have a pfSense based AP since it has better trouble shooting and reporting facilities than I have found in the few cheap external APs I have used.

@stephenw10: Loads of errors can be a bad cable or a poorly secured card that's moved in it's slot. I assume you would have tried changing the cables but I mention it in case. Steve Thanks for the response. Can't be the cables, because prior to this build, I had pfSense running on a T40 laptop for 6 months straight with NO errors on the WAN or LAN interface, with the same cables.

@tirsojrp: 4 - pFsense is not optimized for multithreading, that 165% performance jump doesn't apply for every scenario. Indeed. The increased benchmark score of the D2550 over the D2500 is due to the former supporting hyper-threading. Not necessarily any advantage in pfSense. This board doesn't beat the Jetway NF9HQL-525 in my opinion. The older D525 actaully benchmarks faster. It's expensive though. Steve

Hmm, interesting result. I wonder what is causing such a huge discrepancy? @Class889: i agree on the powerD statement but first i must know what my router is capable of :) The P4 chip you are using does not have any useful power saving features. It would be almost pointless running powerd. @Class889: but i wonder, how come ppl dont pass the 1gbit barrier? It's because people are, mostly, measuring the throughput of the pfSense box. Usually what people are interested in is how much bandwidth can I handle with X hardware between WAN and LAN. Testing that bi-directionally is just not relevant. Steve

@stephenw10: This should not be limiting to 20Mbps. However this does put extra load on the cpu. It should be well within the capabilities of your P4 but check the output of 'top -SH' when it's limiting to make sure. Steve when I do top-Sh I can see the top going to 100%.. not exactly sure what i'm lookign at. If I just look at the output of top, everything's below 1%. Without the shaper, the speed seems to vary (from 1 of the port of he switch) from 20 to 45Mbit as there are other traffic on the network. But whatever shaper I put in, it'll drop the speed down to below 20Mbit. I've tried different wizard, but they all seem to throttle the overall bandwidth even when I put in the correct up/down numbers. My question is no longer with the hardware. Therefore I'll hop over to the other sub forum to troubleshoot traffic shaper. Conclusion: Realtek 8139 can do the 100Mbit, but is unstable, a lot of crashes and resets. Intel 82559 is stable and able to do the 100Mbit throughput.

@NuSkooler: Good, I got the impression that some of the information in that thread may have been blown out of proportion or just plain FUD. I think at this point I've pretty much settled on "Option 1" above. I don't plan on having much disk I/O so unless I get faulty parts, it should be solid for quite some time. Yes, a modern 30GB SSD should last a long time on a standard pfSense install.  That's an early SandForce drive, which should be fine.  I would, however, make sure to update the firmware before you start.  If I recall correctly, that era of SandForce reserved some space for wear leveling and helped with performance, which is good (more recent versions are releasing that space back to the user for more capacity, since you don't exactly need that much space for your purpose, that extra wear leveling slack can help with longevity, faster is a side bonus.)

Yeah, a wiki-site would be awesome.

@stan-qaz: @joshfokis: @stan-qaz: What IP and mask do you have for pfSense LAN port and what is set in the LAN section of the WRT setup? The IPs must be in the same network but different and the subnet masks must match exactly. I am using the 192.168.5.x/24. When I connect to the WRT by cable I can access the configuration page for WRT but I must set a static ip. I cannot get to the pfsense page when connected. If there's anything else I can provide to help please let me know. So you have your: pfSense LAN port set to 192.168.5.1 /24 WRT WAN port set to DHCP (it won't get an address but it also won't conflict with the LAN network) WRT LAN port set to 192.168.5.XXX  /24 - where XXX is from 002 to 254 (a manual setting as the WRT LAN doesn't do DHCP) Your PC set to 192.168.5.XXX  /24 - where XXX is from 002 to 254 but not the same as the WRT LAN @stan-qaz: If you configure a computer with a third IP address in the same network as pfSense and the WRT and the same network mask you used in both of them, what happens when you connect the computer directly to a WRT LAN port? Can you see the WRT from it? You do have the Ethernet cable from the pfSense box going to one of the LAN ports on the WRT and the computer plugged into another of the LAN ports? pfSense LAN  –->  WRT LAN 1 WRT LAN 2 ---> PC WRT WAN disconnected If you have this setup and the addresses above you should be able to see and set the WRT settings from the computer with or without the connection to the pfSense box. You should be able to see the pfSense box once you connect it to the WRT LAN port since that is a simple switch and the WRT router/firewall is not involved in the process. If you don't have anything else hooked to the pfSense box try these static IPs and masks and see if they work for you. This takes the pfSense DHCP server out of the loop for assigning the PC an address and is as simple a setup as you can try. pfSense LAN port set to 192.168.5.1 /24 WRT LAN port set to 192.168.5.10  /24 WRT WAN port set to DHCP Your PC set to 192.168.5.20  /24 Once you can see the WRT and pfSense confirm that the WRT DHCP server is turned off and set the PC to use DHCP and pfSense should assign it an address and all should work as before. At this point the other LAN ports and wireless should also be operational as far as connection and DHCP functions. Thanks for the help I did try this setup and it continued to give me issues so I figured it might be hardware related and not configuration related. It turns out I was correct. I returned the NIC and got another one and I have to admit it gave me a fight for a moment but now it is up and running and working beautifully. The previous NIC I had was a TRENDnet. I now am running an ASUS card. I just would like to thank every one for their help in trying to get me up and running.

Whoops! Didn't know that pfsense doesn't support N. That does explain why I couldn't find it :) A desktop is a possibility, but I was looking for a small all in one appliance (no moving parts and power consumption). Thx for the reply!

Yep, massive overkill. Better to run pfSense virtualised on that box. At least you can then use the rest of it for something useful. Steve

I don't see that one on our list: http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Known_Working_3G-4G_Modems Do you actually have that modem, or are you looking to potentially purchase it? If you have it, and 2.0.x doesn't detect it, you might give a 2.1 snapshot a try and see if it works there.