I (and somebody I know who's spent far too long working with large ISPs) have had mixed success with TCP offloading.  When it works, it's great.  But I've had lots of strange situations where it breaks things and identify that ToE is the cause can take a while.  Intel cards seem to be better in that regard.

Well, as of right now the computer is working great. I have not had the problems any more. The identifiers are re0 and re1, so they are the realtek cards. After the upgrade I have not had a single problem with the computer. I am getting my full speed from my internet. This is for a home office, not a data center or anything like that. I move about 220-260GB total a month, and since the upgrade everything is very smooth. The update fixed everything, but if I do have to replace the cards in the future I will keep in mind that the realtek cards don't work as great as the intel cards, but maybe by then that will be fixed, who knows? Since everything is working great, I'm going to mark this thread as solved. Thanks for your help everyone.  ;D

After 1 year I report my experience: no failures, no reboots required, no issues, no crashes … simply perfect! Now has 126days of uptime with Pfsense version 1.2 embedded.

You can't go wrong with Intel cards, they are develloping the drivers themselves so the whole catalog is running. (except some onboard)

search the forum, I seen something just like this here before.  The other thing would be to try to sullrich's 6.3 verison.  I running it now it's awesome and very stable.  Seems to gotten my DELL SC440 to work with all interfaces perfectly. RC

I ended up ordering two ALIX 2C3's from here: http://www.netgate.com/product_info.php?cPath=60_88&products_id=652 These come with pfSense preinstalled on a flash card, so I won't have to mess with the serial port - just hook it up and browse to the WAN interface on 192.168.1.1.  Whoo!

@zirconx: What if my PC is an Intel, and the fit-pc is an AMD (it is)?  Would I end up with the wrong kernel installed?  I don't know much about BSD, maybe it just uses a generic kerneal that runs on all CPUs??? Does not matter, they use a generic kernel which runs on just about any half-way recent PC based hardware.

the only issue I've seen with SMP is in multi wan configs,  the slbd process which does the load balancing will run away with one of the cores for some reason, and/or spawn multiple instances  on the SMP kernel.  This didn't seem to be a show stopper on my box, but I wasn't running snort or ntop or other cpu intensive things. This apparently will be gone with 1.3 as they transition off slbd I believe

I split this out into a new post, don't hijack other threads please.

@cmb: FreeBSD 6.3 probably works better with this NIC. There is a pfSense 1.2 with a FreeBSD 6.3 base available here:  http://cvs.pfsense.org/~sullrich/testing_images/6/FreeBSD_RELENG_6_3/pfSense_RELENG_1_2/ that several thousand people have downloaded to use with newer hardware and it's proven to work well. The 1.2.1 release will be based on 6.3 as well, snapshots will be coming soon. This is probably your only hope of ever getting it working. For more info why it's so, search and read the topics concerning the new intel atom board.

Ah, my brother! I asked a similar question a month or so ago and got a rather rude response from one of the "Hero's" on here.  Regardless, I think it will be very difficult to tweak PFSense to do this.  However, you can get Ubuntu 8.04 installed on it and then the skies the limit.  I'm working on setting one up as an Asterisk system for my house.  I made some notes about how to do this here: http://www.thecruftofmybrain.com/2008/05/07/raqbuntu-lives/ I might still try to do something with PFSense but I think it's going to be very challenging. Pretty decent small PC's for about $30 on ebay.  It's hard to resist finding something for them to do.

It does, and apparently I just got really unlucky on the batch of computers I chose to test with. I went through the BIOS and disabled everything from serial to parallel and audio, and it seems to boot now. I'm pretty sure ACPI was already disabled but now it looks like it boots and is running fine. I'll try with the other ones and see if I have the same fix. I walked the virtual BIOS for VMWare but I didn't find any settings for that. Thinking back, I've used VMWare to prep USB flash drives for deployment, but I don't think I ever booted to them in VMWare after the install.

Any update on the HeroLogic hardware?

I know the cardbus PCI card does work because I have pluged it into a windows machine and all functions well. I will try that command tonight and post the output.

@wallabybob: Another datapoint about Realtek NICs. I also have a Jetway mini-ITX board, but a 627F series board with a single onboard VIA Rhine 10/100 NIC. I purchased the single 10/100 port daughter board which has a Realtek 8139 10/100 NIC. FWIW, 627F here also but with the addition of the 3x1Gb lan daughter board. Despite the extra 3 potential ports, I built it out as a 'router-on-a-stick' using only the main embedded port and VLANs. New pfSense user and I just completed the install and initial testing (looks stable so far). Tomorrow begins production use so I don't know yet how it will hold up to load. If all goes well, I plan on testing configs using the extra ports (versus ROAS) to see how it affects throughput and CPU load. Great service from "logic supply" on the equipement.

@Rusty64bit: The re driver in 6.3rel should support the card re – RealTek 8139C+/8169/816xS/811xS/8101E PCI/PCIe Ethernet adapter driver Unfortunately, it doesn't. For more information see this thread (click).

The ports need to be on the same broadcast domain. That can be accommodated (or not properly accommodated) with a L2 or L3 switch.

Might be a quirk in your motherboard's ACPI. I'd try upgrading the BIOS first if it isn't the latest. If that doesn't change anything, try disabling ACPI in pfSense.

It's not possible for any OS to "not recognize the processor" and run at some slower speed. Output from what top shows would be helpful in determining what's happening.