LOL 16 gig of ram! damn that'd be funny…but since you know it wont support it now...and it seems you want it for basically like a fast cache setup or something...maybe read up and setup a SSD...they are getting pretty cheap now...and the initial write may be painfully slow (at least on the cheaper SSD's, but if you are willing to spend money..the expensive ones writes are pretty fast.....but the cheap ones reads are pretty damn fast...for caching though...after you get a good chunk of data, you'll be doing a lot of reads. just a thought of a workaround for ya. good luck.

@Hugovsky: @Emab: How can I check if the problem is in the chipset, and how can I try to resolve this? Can you check what chipset is on your board? if it's a 915 intel, then you might have a problem. Also, do you have all mem banks ocupied? It was already said by wallybybob…this wont be able to be fixed.  64-bit systems/software will fix this limitation you will need to ensure your hardware/software both support 64-bit to take advantage of 4 gigs or more of ram. copied from FAQ's  to answer you next question...pfsense does not work in 64-bit mode yet...so we'll just have to wait...It's fast enough the way it is for me and probably all of us though. :) Does pfSense support 64 bit systems? From PFSenseDocs Yes, but only in 32 bit mode. There are numerous installations running on 64 bit processors from Intel and AMD, but 64 bit mode is not yet supported (and not needed for firewall scenarios).

ok i realize that this is really old but i've been really busy and havent even had time to mess with this =, my apologies on my absence and late response… ANYWAY, wallabybob, I think your right, it wasnt that it didnt detect it...because it did allow me to run through all the drivers, unfortunately none of them worked. I may try it when i can get this board again lol i had to use it for a much needed upgrade to a server =P I did plan on the riser card, so thats not new news to me. It doesnt have the right cutouts, but i cant find a 1u case with such a low depth, so i figured i would dremel out the "static" i/o shield so i can use the one that comes with the motherboard, and thus open me up for future upgrades without having to buy the special board for that case.

Issue was solved by installing the Thinkpad Configuration Utility in Windows -> Drive Bay -> Disable.  Fortunately I have another x40 that runs Windows so I just switched out the hard drives to do this.  Everything working great now. For people who find this thread through google I will post a few performance details.  The x40 is functioning as a router/firewall/Nat device on my home internet line (40-50mbps line, fiber -> VDSL).  Using bittorrent I loaded up 60 torrents (tv shows) and cranked up the max connections.  While downloading around 45mbps with about 3,000 open states the cpu (pentium M 1ghz) was at 50% and memory usage (768mb physical memory) was around 15%.

he is using now p4 celeron system. he gave ibm as gift 2 someone.

Thanks for you thoughts!  From what I understand that NIC driver has been around a long time … but who knows! Strange that this has worked successfully for almost 2 years. However perhaps we've had more more traffic recently and that's begun to be a problem. I still like my interrupt theory ;) Yes, I'm looking forward to upgrading once 1.2.3 is done! In the meantime, we're looking to upgrade the hardware. We'll bite the bullet and go for a real (albiet old) server and Intel gigabit NICs, along with fans to fail and a big UPS because it will use real power. This should give us enough margin for growth and error that we shouldn't lose hours of productivity again...

@dreamslacker: @mevans336: I'd like to throw a boatload of packets at it, but iperf doesn't seem to be designed for that as the most I can get it to pass it about 65k pps. Does anyone have any ideas for how to pound it with packets, somewhere in the million pps range? Reduce the size of the packets using the -l argument.  65k pps for a gigabit link would suggest that your packets are close to 2kBytes. I'll give that a shot, thanks.

Found it… ad0: 977MB <sandisk sdcfj-1024="" hdx="" 4.32="">at ata0-master PIO4 Hope this means I can use the 1 GB image of nanobsd...   ;D</sandisk>

No, it is attached to a gigabit switch. after reloading with the above config, it now shows: nfe0: flags=8843 <up,broadcast,running,simplex,multicast>metric 0 mtu 1500 options=10b <rxcsum,txcsum,vlan_mtu,tso4>ether 00:22:68:68:ec:7c inet 192.168.1.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255 inet6 fe80::222:68ff:fe68:ec7c%nfe0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2 media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseTX <full-duplex>) status: active</full-duplex></rxcsum,txcsum,vlan_mtu,tso4></up,broadcast,running,simplex,multicast>

Thx!  :)

Hi everybody, I tried this network adapter (Intel Gigabit ET Dual Port Srvr Adpt) in pfsense 1.2.3-RC3, but this attempt haven't result  :( Have you any other idea? Thank you all

Thanks for the replies.  In fact, I have opted to install a pfSense server in our deployment and purchased a support contract with the pfSense folks.  So far, so good.  No major issues or hiccups using pfSense, and we saved a ton of $$$ for this particular install. Many thanks to the pfSense team for making such a great (free) product! -Ron

Thanks, I figured it was, and that realtek nic seems to work fine, the speedtest says 31,000kbits (31mbit) on that particular nic, if I stumble onto another intel card ill swap it.

@jmwachtel: Anyone had any luck install pfSense on these severs?  Looking at the dual 2.8ghz w/ x2 GB ethernet. As general note i've seen few network problems with blades using internal network of chassis, but passthru modules have worked fine for anything we have tried. Never tried to install pfSense on one. Also one thing i've seen when installing debian on IBM blades is at install time cdrom is detected on SDA and internal hdd on SDB, but on first boot it is opposite. This is most likely problem with install media but it is good to know if you encounter issues on first boot after install.