80W should be enough but one user found it a problem (using a 60W power brick anyway). The Pentium-M 770 is almost certainly not worth it. There is a huge premium, even now years after release, and the 533MHz FSB Pentium-Ms are not supported directly by the est(4) driver so speedstep doesn't work. I don't think it supports ECC ram. Steve

You can backup the config from the old, and restore it to the new, that's works fine.

IMO Passive cooling is a rapidly growing niche, and Intel is doing pretty well with the Atom so far :) But I believe this is getting a bit off-topic. The Atom was first mentioned on this thread just as an example of why the OP shouldn't really need an i5. Many of us suggested to go to a lower-end Sandy like a Pentium or Celeron, but the Atom was never directly suggested as a solution for this, it was only mentioned to make a point. @stephenw10: Whilst I agree that an Atom would easily handle a 50Mbps connection with almost any number of users I have to also agree with Asterix's view that it seems pointless to use an Atom if you're building a new box. Low end Sandybridge systems can be built for almost the same cost and will likely consume a similar power level. If at some later stage you need to implement Squid, Snort, complex traffic shaping or VPNs you could easily run out of CPU cycles on an Atom. About the only niche left for an Atom is in an entirely passively cooled system where the maximum power dissipation of a Sandybridge CPU is too high to be practical. That particular niche is rapidly being filled by ARM powered CPUs in other markets. My own personal view.  ;) Steve

If I recall the details (it's been years since I've seen/looked into that), some NIC chipsets have bugs with short cables, and the drivers apply a work around to fix that. The snippet from if_sis.c seems to confirm that. It's safe to ignore as long as it's not causing problems. If it does, replace the NICs.

I don't know about 3DM2 but a number of people have struggled with LSI raid controllers. Not that many are supported, especially under FreeBSD8.1 and hence pfSense 2.0.1. See: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=mfi&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+8.1-RELEASE&arch=default&format=html LSI do have source on their site for the 9650SE under FreeBSD 8.x though. Steve

Should be fine unless you plan on installing Snort IDS or other resource intensive packages.

Hi, If you are searching by model description you will found that it has only 128mb of ram and 64 mb of flash…i think is too less for pfsense but  you may try to improve it check if you can add more mb of ram's and the more flash space in pdf description it's type one compact flash. See link: http://www.gta.com/downloads/external/productGuide/GB-1200_HardwareSpec.pdf

An external AP would give you access to 802.11n, that would be faster yes, but not necessarily more stable. An Alix with an Atheros 5413 card is perfectly stable, and it supports 802.11a wich is often used for wireless bridging because it usually have much less interference. It ultimately depends on how much speed and flexibility you really need. @bmironb: It's inconvenient to use AP wired to alix ? i think is a better solution in comparation with wifi cards, you also could use 300mbs acess points and on those to use antennas.From my experience  will be a better solution and more stable, i'm using pfsense but on pc platform with AP on lan AP is exactly your specified routers from above.

The fact that you can still see the ZTE CD-ROM implies that it has not switched. Although you can see the MMC device which id different to other similar modems. It could be that usb serial driver has not attatched to the ports. You should load usb_modeswitch and try one of the ZTE command strings. perha ~~# ZTE MF190 devices DefaultVendor= 0x19d2 DefaultProduct= 0x0117 MessageContent="5553424312345678000000000000061e000000000000000000000000000000" MessageContent2="5553424312345679000000000000061b000000020000000000000000000000" MessageContent3="55534243123456702000000080000c85010101180101010101000000000000" NeedResponse=1 CheckSuccess=20 Steve~~

I'm also in the market for a good wireless N dual band access point. Small Net Builder's benchmarks has convinced me that to get the best wireless performance I should just buy a wireless router and go dd-wrt (which I am familiar with). The RT-N66U looks great, and it has dd-wrt support, even approved from ASUS. Might end up with that, but wireless AC is looking appealing too, might stick it out with my GN router till AC comes out.

https://github.com/pfsense/pfsense/blob/master/etc/rc.bootup#L137 https://github.com/pfsense/pfsense/blob/master/etc/inc/system.inc#L1529 https://github.com/pfsense/pfsense-tools/blob/master/pfPorts/alix_reset_button/files/alix_reset_button.c There isn't a constant polling going on for that button, though perhaps you could setup a minicron process to run the poll every few seconds

I am also using the 7120, in my home lab. Got it off of Ebay for $75.00. Installing pfsense was exactly the same as the instruction for the 5420 except I did not disable ACPI. I have ditched it for a dell poweredge 850 with gigabit NIC(6). Currently working on getting pfsense on my HP Neoware e140 and e100.

Hi Steve, Thank you for your answer. Now I remember that to enter the bios I was forced to use a keyboard and a monitor. From the dmesg output it seems that interface rl3 was erroneously disabled via bios instead interface et0, wasn't it? Regards, Stenio

Finally, I've sent my Alix to an electronics repair shop. They just told me that one of the VT6105M NICs was dead. This fault caused my problem - after removing the NIC, my board boots again. However, I'm neither able to find this NIC in any shop in our country nor as a part of a used motherboard or a PCI card (people from the repair shop offered me a new NIC chip, however, it was very expensive). I know that the NIC can be bought in China, but I still have a (possibly stupid) question - can be this VIA chip replaced by another "similar" one with same pinout from VIA Rhine series? Can it be replaced by a chip from another manufacturer? Thanks for your responses. AWM

I suggest you search the forums for PXG4BPI - I think the question has come up a few times in the past.

Thank you all for your kind responses. By removing the screw underneath the warrantee laber I was able to open the case.

Usually if you have an incompatible timecounter set then the logs get filled with errors very quickly. Something like: kernel: timecounter TSC must not be in use when changing frequencies; change denied You can check from the command line: [2.0.1-RELEASE][root@pfsense.fire.box]/root(3): sysctl kern.timecounter.hardware kern.timecounter.hardware: TSC [2.0.1-RELEASE][root@pfsense.fire.box]/root(4): sysctl kern.timecounter.choice kern.timecounter.choice: TSC(800) i8254(0) dummy(-1000000) I don't have speedstep on that machine so I haven't switched from TSC. I think I noted most of what you need to do here: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,20095.msg161139.html#msg161139 My experience with 2GHz Pentium-M 760 was that the est(4) driver brought up an incorrect set of speedstep frequencies and the logs filled with 'calcru: runtime went backwards' errors. This may be solvable though. On my box I saved 5W at idle, about 15%. I saved far more with a DC power supply. Steve

Good to hear jimp, but the APM command actually hasn't stopped my start/stop count from increasing very fast… not AS fast, but still far too quickly.