On topic, my brother just retired a PD 3.0GHz. It was using 130W at the wall, idle. The replacement X2 240 system measures ~45W idle at the wall. Both using integrated ATI graphics. The newer C2D I would expect to use no more than that in a similar configuration, so yeah, quite a difference.

@jimp: I thought that some USB ralink devices were supposed to work, but it may be picky about the chipset. IIRC the ural and rum drivers were both on 1.2.3, both of those are USB ralink drivers. I've had the pfSense 1.2.3 rum driver recognise a DLink G122 and a TP-Link TL-WN321G USB sticks. I think only some revisions of the G122 have the Ralink chipset.

@vatson: VLAN 2 is not actually used anymore on our network, so I'll probably keep it as a "ghost native vlan" for the pfSense uplink port. Interesting.  I do that for all my Cisco switches as a matter of best practice, but I've never seen it required.

The AP is separate, a Ubiquiti radio. I don't think they support client isolation, but I could be wrong.

no i mean double port card not quad, why? it is cheaper :) Why would riser make difference, well since is one slot with riser that have 2 slots, and 2 nics… so i asked... many thanks for answers!

I don't know if you're still working on this, but this seems similar behavior to my Nokia ip530.  I needed to enable "device polling" in the advanced setup (while the HDD was still in the host machine used to load pfSense).  Otherwise, ifconfig would show two NICs as active, but would not have an IP or be pingable and the other 2 NICs wouldn't come up at all. YMMV. edit: these were Intel 21143 NICs.

Yeah, it was Cat 5.  I did not realize I even had Cat 5 laying around, but with the Cat 6 cable everything is still working well.

The 88W8688 is supported by the Linux Libertas driver (see http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/libertas As yet I haven't found out if the driver supports Access Point mode. There is at least one firmware module to be loaded. It should be possible to load the firmware in a platform independent way. I don't know the protocol for porting a Linux driver to FreeBSD. Having the sources for an already working driver would make the creation of a FreeBSD driver a fair bit easier than starting from scratch.

http://www.networkliquidators.com/webwiz/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=9360 I am not concerned about ARP flooding… I dont have any workstations or other things behind my L7 firewall...

@evildave: I've seen a couple places that claim availability of the X7SPA-H in the $170 range, but they're in the US and I haven't bothered to verify that. Check out Provantage - http://www.provantage.com/supermicro-x7spa-h~7SUPM362.htm

JAD3INLANG from the store listed as JAD3INLANG-PB on Jetway site I payed 67 eur. They sport the Intel 82541PI controller.

You should consider moving up to a machine with pci-e and higher bus speed.  An Atom CPU is going to be a hindrance as you will be working it pretty hard while a 1066Mhz bus dual or quad core intel will easily have enough power to handle this load. Maybe even more importantly, get GOOD nic cards not cheap broadcom cards.  I like the intel pro cards, very fast and reliable.

Right now, it seems increasingly likely that I will just get a Firebox x700, but only if the Realtek Ethernet problems have been fixed. If possible I would use an old thin client off of eBay but 1. I'm not sure how easy it is to install alternative native OSes on it and 2. I don't see any that have dual Ethernet ports. Pity :(

Hi Fakster, have a look at the user manual: http://www.nexcom.com/ProductModel_Download.aspx?id=97c0aec4-d471-49af-b4f5-78f12f0c57a8

The fix to the issue seems to be to disable LRO echo "dev.igb.0.enable_lro=0" >>/etc/sysctl.conf echo "dev.igb.1.enable_lro=0" >>/etc/sysctl.conf And reboot. This fixed the issue for me.  Of course, one looses the benefits of LRO….

Appendix: it was definitely the usb CF adaptor, switching to the new one made all of the other 4GB CFs work.

Thx for the help but none of the boards are avaiable in the EU anymore.