If you have a provider that hands off an ethernet (wired or wireless) connection then you do not need your ISP's device.  If you've got a provider that brings service in over phone lines or coax then you will need the appropriate modem from them to convert to ethernet.  Most ADSL and Cable modems can be set to bridge mode where all they do is the conversion and your hardware (in this case, pfsense) handles the DHCP or PPPoE handshake.

The Alix 2D13 accepts 7 to 20V - http://store.netgate.com/ALIX2D13-P40C85.aspx - I get fully assembled kits with CF card and pfSense from Netgate. The kit comes with 15V 18W power supply. I have been running one directly on 12V for about a month with no trouble. The Alix 2D13 uses about 6W in operation. In some places I already have an ordinary TP-Link TD-W8901G ADSL router/AP in front of the pfSense and lots of friends are using them. It's easy to use the same thing everywhere, then we can keep a spare. I could try the TD-8616, should use less power, but then that is another different box to keep spares for, document and support. TD-W8901G draws about 6W, so if a theoretical USB ADSL modem needed say 3W anyway, I am only 3W worse off with the TP-Link. For support it is more hassle - the separate ADSL box is another point of HW or SW failure at a remote site. For the work connections I already have multiple pfSense, so would like to keep using pfSense everywhere. Then we can have similar settings at every location and OpenVPN connections that work (no time wasted debugging connecting between different router software). So I think I'll stick with the pfSense on ALIX with an ADSL device sitting in front of OPT1. I am in Nepal with a mix of city, town and remote connections with a wide range of speeds. Power is always a problem here - often worse in the cities due to extended hours of load-shedding!

@jms703: Curious, now that you've had the board for some time, what are your thoughts? Any issues or problems? So far the only issues I do have is that 64 bit version of pfsense 2.0.1 does not run due to graphic issues. I did not found the time to try out if the freebsd graphic driver implemented in pfsense 2.1 snapshot is working better. http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,46489.0.html @jms703: Are you handling any IPSec or OpenVPN with this hardware? I'm interested to hear how this Atom chip handles VPN traffic. Not yet. I'm using this box as an "oversized" firewall with squid and snort for home use. OpenVPN I also will set up in the future. But here I will not be able to give you some helpfull information regarding maximum performance.

In this mode you will be using the wireless interface as a client (station mode) so there are less restrictions as to which adapters you can use. FreeBSD 8.1 (on which pfSense 2.0.x is based) does not support 802.11N so there is little point in spending extra on an adapter that supports it. Indeed it's much more likely to work using an older b/g adapter. Some 802.11N adapters will work with pfSense but only in G mode. The most complete list of what wifi  adapters will work with pfSense is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AojFUXcbH0ROdHgwYkFHbkRUdV9hVWljVWl5SXkxbFE&hl=en#gid=0 If you wanted it to ever work as an access point you need one that supports hostap mode. The airlive X.USB appears to use the Atheros AR9170 chipset. This will definitely not work with 2.0.1 and probably not with 2.1.  :( Steve

I don't know, it's weird. Yes the card is seen by pfSense and appears to be working. If you run cryptotest it works well. However if you setup a VPN and try to use any of the encryptions supported by the SafeXcel 1141 you will find it doesn't work.  :-\ Steve

Yea that server will work.

@gsp: Now on the HP i have other problem even that i partitioned my HD to use 20GB from 160 it stucks on installation on 38% staying there forever!!… :( The universe has not yet ended so you are exaggerating, at least a little, in saying "forever". I recall my fresh installation of pfSense 2.0.1 from USB stick seemed to be stuck on 38% long enough for me to think it had hung. You might need to be a bit more patient.  I suspect waiting an hour should be more than enough.  I didn't record how long I waited and I haven't repeated it to time the wait at 38%.

My pfSense 2.0.1 has a 800MHz VIA CPU, 256MB RAM, a little less than 50% RAM used and 0 swap used. I run minimal packages. I suspect startup might be quite demanding on memory (and possibly swap) - it could invoke a number of short lived applications.

Can you post the exact ACPI message? Maybe a photo with readable text?

It may be natively supported in FreeBSD 9, so I'll leave it there for when I upgrade to 2.1. In the meantime, I have a number of USB Wireless adapters, they just won't work as elegantly as the the internal PCI-E Port.

Same board and same problem here :( As advised the nics are recognized with the development snapshots of 2.1 The question is are they stable enough for production?

I tried that, pulled the cover off and found the a capacister had blow on the system board.  It took out the ethernet ports and I was getting other werid issues.  I check out the x700 that I have and it had failing fans and a electrical short. Until I can find something else to use I stuck with a westell dsl modem and it is driving me crazy!

Well, it seems I may have fixed it. From what I can tell it was probably the network adapter from the virtual machine may have still been enabled. I thought they had all been disabled when I shut down the VM but perhaps not. Basically I restarted the firewall with nothing connected on the LAN and then reconnected one device at a time. Before I connected the machine that had the old firewall on VM on it I made sure it was shut down and the adapters configured properly. Seems to be up and running properly now :) TL;DR Probably the network seeing 2 gateways on the network and got confused.

After restoring the config and connecting the router to a mock network with internet access, the responsiveness issue seems to be resolved. I have some firewall aliases and IPSec connections configured with dynamic DNS addresses, perhaps the GUI depends on resolving these? Thanks, Todd

Just wanted to say "thanks" to both people who responded. I appreciate you taking the time to help a newbie!