again tyvm for all your help. I had time to play with it tonight and found out that it will only auto negotiate when both ports are being used. If I only used fxp0 then I needed to use a crossover cable, but if I used fxp0 and fxp1 then I can use a regular patch cable with no problems.

@Supermule: If you want high throughput, do NOT use flash cards…. Use HD install. CPU, I think, will suffer the most DoS attack. SATA is the preferred disk, if you do not have SCSI available or SCSI is not an option at all. Routing, NAT, firewalling, and shaping don't touch the disk at all.  In fact, you could boot pfSense from the LiveCD and not see a difference past boot time. DoS attacks come in many flavors.  Some of them will be CPU intensive (single host causing an expensive calculation repeatedlt) and some will be memory intensive (lots of hosts all doing a single request will cause the state tables to grow wildly).  If in doubt, buy the best CPU/RAM config you can afford and hope for the best.  FWIW, I do high-bandwidth, few connection traffic with a 1GHz Celeron M and 1GB of RAM just fine.

@Skidoo32: Thats an expensive board too :( $ 310.00 AUD Considering the Intel D945GSEJT http://www.mini-box.com.au/purchase/browse-detail.asp?menuId=45&start=1&laCode=ENGAU&productId=189 Oh…  I was under the impression that the Avalue price was in US Dollars...    :D I suppose the D945GSEJT-M350 kit would do great too.

The FreeBSD man pages can be accessed through http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi The ALTQ man page lists a number of interfaces which are "ALTQ capable". Among them udav is a USB wired NIC, rum and ural are USB wireless NICs. The relevant man pages usually give more details of brands and models.

I'm currently using unembedded 1.2.3-rc1 on the original 128MB CF card. I've got an 8GB CF coming and plan to put a nanobsd installation on. The 128 will then go into a 6 port X700. I'll then try some carp :) its just with 4 spare ports going spare. having an inbuilt switch would be cool. ::)

@Roodawakening: Actually, I'm a cop so money doesn't grow on trees in my household. And do you mean an Athlon II 240? I didn't know there was such an animal as a Phenom II 240. Oh…and I could always "downcore" it through the BIOS, too. Oh… Right...  Athlon II.  Severely sleep deprived these days..  :P  I was thinking of the 550 Black Edition.

@Tuckie: part of the mini-PCIe spec requires having usb2.0 pins as well.  Because of this, many mini-PCIe cards just use usb chipsets In which case the host connection and power supply is by USB and the mini-PCIe connector on the PCB effectively just provides a mounting mechanism?

After much more silent debate ;)  I realized that for 10 dollars more, I can buy the case separately: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811120008 And then just pick up the cheapest intel atom motheboard instead: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121342 Alongside this NIC: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833106121 Anyone see any problems with this setup?

Without knowing what the actual specs are, it's hard to say anything definitive. However, with 60% memory usage you've got 40% unused so plenty of headroom.  I'd say that it's time to updgrade when: a) Memory passes 90% (excluding the disk cache) or you're hitting swap b) CPU usage regularly hits 100% and stays there Disk usage is often down to logs or proxy caches so you can easily clean out the logs or the cache.

turns out my gige copper nic was the issue! the darn thing.  I replaced it and go figure, pfsense sees both NICs now, even stable 1.2.2 sees both, so I am very pleased.  pfSense wins yet again! :)

@fastcon68: As I found out by talking to Vonage support it requires a connection to both the wan and lan.  It will not work unless they are both connected. RC Mine works fine via a dedicated NIC connected to the WAN port.  Nothing on the LAN side. Val

In this case its even easier. All you need to do is create a static route for the Ip of your remote end pointing to you second gateway. Unless you're willing to buy a VLAN capable switch you wont be able to have two separate interfaces on the pfSense itself.

Thanks again, appreciate the tweaking required to test. Martin.

or Check out www.ironsystems.com I have now 3 boxes from them all 19"x8" -1 U rackmounts. AR210s all work GREAT under pfsense.

Yup works fine, I'm using the exact same board with a half dozen VLANs and it's working great.

I saw the eval command and thought I run it against my virtual machine(quad phemon 2.5 GHZ processor).  I have 2 processors dedicated to my firewall. $ openssl speed -evp aes-128-cbc OpenSSL 0.9.8e 23 Feb 2007 built on: Fri May 15 13:50:54 EDT 2009 options:bn(64,32) md2(int) rc4(idx,int) des(ptr,risc1,16,long) aes(partial) blowfish(idx) compiler: cc available timing options: USE_TOD HZ=128 [sysconf value] timing function used: getrusage The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed. type            16 bytes    64 bytes    256 bytes  1024 bytes  8192 bytes aes-128-cbc      68862.24k    74318.49k    76634.68k    77303.50k    77649.46k $ openssl speed -evp aes-128-cbc -engine cryptodev OpenSSL 0.9.8e 23 Feb 2007 built on: Fri May 15 13:50:54 EDT 2009 options:bn(64,32) md2(int) rc4(idx,int) des(ptr,risc1,16,long) aes(partial) blowfish(idx) compiler: cc available timing options: USE_TOD HZ=128 [sysconf value] timing function used: getrusage The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed. type            16 bytes    64 bytes    256 bytes  1024 bytes  8192 bytes aes-128-cbc      68590.93k    74215.00k    76918.08k    77146.59k    77406.33k I don't have any encryption hardware.  That is supported at this time.  How do my numbers compare to other people's systems.  I thinking about moving some hardware around and debating about replacing a server.  I don't what to take to big of a performance hit. RC