Use HPVSA for storage

I asked the eBay seller wareagletek who is offering the HP-t5740 Intel Atom N280 units about power draw.  Here is what he said: I dont have anything official number since i do not have a killawatt but i have had other customer provide numbers, anywhere from 10-14w depending on workload, but at idle near 10W. YMMV

@messerchmidt: hey all, using the system that was my freenas box as a pfsense. system is as follows: core2 e6420, gigabyte p35c-ds3, 4gb ddr2, random nvidia 210 pcie card, intel low-power Intel 82574L Gigabit Ethernet Controller x2, 450w antec psu. Instead of using a HD or SSD , was going to use an older transcend 120x 8gb slc compact flash card on a SYBA SD-ADA40001 SATA II To Compact Flash Adapter with a full install. cable modem to one intel nic. other intel nic to network. Suggestions? Seems fine.  I used to use Transcend SLC CF cards with full installs for my systems as well.  I don't think they were the 120x models though.  They were gray and "300x" is coming to mind.

And to boot my advice may be bunk. I just read you could use  a usb cable and see the device as a modem on some companies MI-FI's models. So wireless bridge would work but may not be the only way. I wonder if you see a usb ethernet adapter in your assignments. Like ue0 or similar. If so you would need pppoe instead.

athlon 5350 +asus matx + some intel nic gigabit pcie cards

Your PPP stuff shows cuaU0 and it needs to be cuaU0.2 ugen1.2: <huawei technologies="">at usbus1 u3g0: <huawei 0="" 2="" technologies="" huawei="" mobile,="" class="" 0,="" rev="" 2.00="" 0.00,="" addr="">on usbus1 u3g0: Found 4 ports. umass1: <huawei 0="" 2="" technologies="" huawei="" mobile,="" class="" 0,="" rev="" 2.00="" 0.00,="" addr="">on usbus1 umass2: <huawei 0="" 2="" technologies="" huawei="" mobile,="" class="" 0,="" rev="" 2.00="" 0.00,="" addr="">on usbus1 Nov 26 23:23:04 ppp: [opt3_link0] MODEM: Fail to open serial port /dev/cuau0 on speed 115200 Good luck and let us know if fixed.</huawei></huawei></huawei></huawei>

I have found some combinations hardware that just won't work with no explanation. I have a laptop here that just won't link to my old faithful SMC switch but works fine with everything else I've tried. It's independent of OS so I think it must be a low level incompatibility somewhere. It's a Realtek NIC. Clearly one (or both) of those devices is not 100% standards compliant and I have found some edge case. If I put another switch in between it works fine. Steve

Looking at the Pfsense MultiWAN 2.0 documents it looks like everything i need is there. I assume a WWAN would be treated the same as a WAN connection for setup? Gateway group for each MC7700 i guess.

Yep, that. You could do worse than using iperf though. As long as you have the same packet size selected there are figures on the forum to compare for other hardware. Steve

@Jason: Mine has been working fine on 2.1.x.  I'm booting a full install from USB though so it's possible there's some kind of strange issue with booting from SATA or running the embedded version.  No idea.  Can you give a full listing of all the hardware you used? Super micro 5018A-FTN4 Intel DC s3500 80gb I will have to try to track down memory dimm  info Also the USB 3 ports were not working on 2.1.5 but work fine on 2.2-beta

Thank you for the replies. I'll keep an eye on it over summer.  I think on the 40deg+ days the laptop fans its sitting on will help!

Thanks for reply, I arrived at FW settings and DNS rule set as UDP ( not TCP ) , OPT1 do runs normally good (Internet connection is ok). so far I ever thought that i should buy the box NICx4 includes , but somehow , it seems not to get this. (looking is little not good…). I will try to set config other USB NIC at this pace. Thanks a lot for reply stephenw10. Even in awkward sentences, Thank you for reading.

To make the changes permanent edit /etc/fstab, change the entries appropriately. Steve

Thanks, would have done  that  already but Lanner requires registration for downloads. I guess it is worth it -before throwing money at the problem. It appears these use an early bios version. Fan section had both System Fan and CPU Fan settings and -Thermal Cruise Mode- or -Manual Mode- for fans and manual mode had no settings and ran 15K as well as the broken Thermal Cruise Mode which halved the speed to 8000K but no adjustability as i have seen on other 4 wire fans. Side note. Tried unsuccessfully to run a MiniPCI wireless-N card in this box on beta. All kinds of brands Mikrotik, Compex, Alpha, TPLink  and all were actually crashing pfSense. Maybe a power issue i dunno. Console was locked up at Atheros reset lock warning….. First box i haven't been able to get working natively. Same box -Slipped in a Mikrotik RB14eu (4mini-PCIe on a X4 PCIe card) And the first wireless AR9xxx card I tested worked fine.

Interesting possibility. I guess you could also use that to provide some failover solution at a much lower level than the pfSense box like any existing SOHO router for example. You might need to by-pass the LAN too though. Much cheaper than a CARP setup. Much less capable also. Thanks. Steve

Support the author. Today I will try to run pfSense on CPU AMD FX8530.

@Jason: I got rid of my 6501-50 quite a while ago, but the answers to your questions, in general terms, are, "too much", and "not dramatically faster than an Alix". Do yourself a favor and skip it. Thank you very much for sharing this. I have been seriously in doubt as to whether I should invest in Soekris, but I have found it really hard to actually locate some clear statistical data on usage.

Another thing to keep in mind is that anecdotal stories about poor performance of one card or another likely came from pfSense 2.1.x or earlier, ie FreeBSD 8.3 or earlier.  pfSense 2.2 is based on FreeBSD 10.1, where hardware support / performance is much different, and hopefully better, than 8.3.  In other words, past experience may not still apply once you move to 2.2