I would definitely upgrade them all. No reason not to, and a number of reasons to do so.

But a 650W PSU compared to the given power from this box or hardware is nonsense in
my eyes, I drive also a Intel Xeon E3-1285v3 and be happy with a 200W PSU, but compared
to the delivered power from this box, the one from the @kicker892 is far far away from.

Sorry, I have no idea what point you're trying to make here.

You could put a 1200W PSU on your system that needs 200W, it still only draws 200W.

You just have LOTS of unused power capacity available for future expansion (1000W worth).

Wow, that's a lot of work for an additional NIC on an end of life platform. :) Neat project for the hack value though, thanks for sharing.

The modem may not have a driver at all in FreeBSD (some searching seems to indicate people have trouble finding one for Windows for that matter), or if it does, it'll just show up as an additional serial port. It won't interfere with anything either way.

@robi:

It's worth checking if there's faulty USB thing plugged in maybe, which pauses POST process (like some USB stick, or keyboard, or mouse, etc.). I'd also unplug IPMI too.

Yeah that's a good idea, boot it up with only the power and VGA plugged into it and see what happens (hopefully would have been suggested via support).

RJ put together a pretty good set of instructions for this at www.hexhound.com/how-to-flash-pfsense-2-1-to-a-watchguard-firebox-x750e-x550e-ssl-500.
Have a look and see if it helps.

This is a known problem with these boxes, mine started doing it on 2.2.4 and worse on 2.2.5.  Do yourselves a favor, either drop back to 2.2.3 and see how that works out, or like I did, scrap the red box and build a computer, buy a 4 port network card and go from there.

Myself and several others, all in the same boat and we tried everything to no avail.  Normally, pulling the network cable out of the port that failed, then plugging it back on solves it, or like you are doing.

I noticed with high traffic it would do it, it just made my systems and network to unreliable to say the least.

Hope this helps.

This is $28 (inc shipping) and is actually listed as a new product. In the Q&A section,
someone asks if its a clone and both responses say its genuine.

Would you please answer the next question truly? How old are you?

Done #PCN-90303

Thanks!

I have a Gen8 but I've never run pfSense on the bare metal so can't say about the Broadcom NICs.

You could overcome any issue with the NICs by running pfSense on ESXi.  That would also give you the opportunity to use those disk bays by running a NAS, web server, mail server and/or anything else you might fancy.  You would have to up the RAM to 8GB though.

Thank you both for your help.

I got completely distracted with work and forgot to come back and check the forum but I really appreciate your help.

Cheers.

Do you use ECC ram modules?

To me the choice of CPU's comes down to power. 95W is one third the usage of electricity. Now TDP is subjective but the fact is that with every die shrink chips get better, if only marginally.. We are talking about a machine that is always powered up 24x7.
Even if the extra cores go unused.  You really didn't specify what packages you plan on running. Truthfully I don't think 10G will require that kind of CPU but nobody ever got fired for using IBM!!

Using for example a modest thin client, you can even get 66Mbit/sec:
https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=87606.msg481510

@shaith:

I don't have a 250 to compare to this old 550 to be certain, but as I recall they were slightly different.

Very minor differences: dual-core Xeon Sossaman instead of single-core Celeron, and maybe 2Gb of RAM instead of 1Gb, plus software licensing (different No of connections, etc.) They are nice little server-class machines. I do love Intel 3100 chipset, the first and the only Intel chipset of its kind.

Bypass and disconnect features are controlled by a dedicated uC - NXP LPC932A1FDH, which resides on the SMBus. I do some sniffing while tinkering with the original software (att.).

It would be nice to control the bypass functionality, but which usage scenarios could be implemented? Simple "nobypass" after power-on? Or more complex scenarios?

bypass_i2c_protocol.xls

This question has been addressed in the past. Don't go with cheap SSD unless you are using SLC type, industrial grade. Find out the write cycle life of you SSD. I've had cheap SSD die on me using Windows7. When you install the full version of pfSense it writes to the drive constantly logging the graphs and other stuff (sorry I'm no expert).

When you run the nano version (compact flash & usb) it is ran from RAM. Everything is loaded from the flash drive into ram at boot and after boot, the running OS exist in RAM. So the intense disk using features of pfSense are turned OFF in nano version. There is an option in pfSense where you can offload logging into a log server.

If you go with a cheap SSD, you can always turn off logging, follow the guide here:
https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=34381.0

Ok, this makes sense to me, I thought the VLAN tagging was used between the PFsense interface and the modem, and couldn't understand why it would be needed. I will try to set it all up without tagging first, then if it fails I'll query the ISP regarding the VLAN tag to use. Thanks!

You can see for yourself what kind of performance you get over here.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/nas4free/files/NAS4Free-ARM/
Number listed there resemble what I am seeing as well.

Odroid best of the bunch at 400mb/sec for a gigabit line.

And what is now the real question here?
I would suggest you to wait two month and then go with a PC Engines APU2B4 board.

@BlueKobold:

even for the sites which dont use ipsec? i'll elaborate a bit about it. sites that dont use ipsec only talk to the non ipsec sites and the ipsec sites only talk to the ipsec sites.

it might be that you are only looking for one or another feature, function or option now or better today,
being prepared and able to do all things is the hint that makes a hardware ready to do all, or let it running
longer as expected, this is my point of view.

If you will be able to get your hands on the Intel Core i7 and the Intel Xeon E3-1220v3 than do it and
go with this both CPUs each on one site. They have their own charm and they are really strong and
right powered. So it might be nothing wrong with this suggestion from me, they both are strong
with enough cores and with AES-NI also ready to run a long time.

thanks a lot :)