Ah bugger this, after ringing a number of places and none getting back to me with a price  ??? Going to use IBM 306 servers, they are old, run 2 x sata drives, P4 3.0GHz and 4GB ram, 2 onboard intel plus quad intel nic fairly low power usage and heaps of spare parts. $150 can't complain.

Yes, the GPU is definitely not an issue since I'm running headless most of the time.  And the Pentium G620's GPU is so feeble anyway that you could probably run it on a x1 or x2 PCIe bus and not notice a difference. I have not noticed any issues with CPU usage.  It hovers well under 5% most of the time (it's almost embarrassing how over-spec'ed this box is with a G620, 4GB RAM, an SSD, and a server-grade NIC). Actually, now that you mention it, I'm not sure if I'm running in AHCI mode or not.  I'll have to check the BIOS settings.  The dmesg log detects my SATA controller as:``` atapci0: <intel ata="" controller=""> port 0xf110-0xf117,0xf100-0xf103,0xf0f0-0xf0f7,0xf0e0-0xf0e3,0xf0d0-0xf0df,0xf0c0-0xf0cf irq 20 at device 31.2 on pci0</intel>

You can do this with pfSense but there are some things you should be aware of: 1. Not all USB broadband devices are supported, check the forum. 2. pfSense will ping the gateway of each interface continually to check that it's still up. This could eat into your data allowance if you have one so you might need to disable it. 3. pfSense is a complete operating system designed to be installed on separate hardware so when you say: @positron: I have no need for other users on my LAN to access the internet in the fail over scenario.  So, I don't need to bother with a separate PC with multiple NICs you will in fact need either dedicated hardware or run it virtualised. Steve

Hi, it's work fine, but how remove +33C gauge? Upd. Solved (I just removed +33)  :)

Yup, Typical HP ^^ For my part, In IBM we trust. SO production will probably go on an IBM ( If I have my way that is ^^ )

It can do I believe. Certainly when WiFi access points first appeared with dual antennas and diversity manufacturers went to great lengths to tell us how much better they were. That could have all been a marketing ploy though! I use one antenna and get 54Mbps (connection speed) throughout the house. I'll run a test for throughput. Steve Edit: An interesting test. I'm getting around 24Mbps real download speed in good signal but that drops off rapidly as soon as the WiFi connection speed starts stepping down. At the furthest point from my box I was getting a rather erratic 10Mb/s and showing 36Mbps connection. All of which is fine for internet usage but could prove a real restriction for local activity.

@Metu69salemi: Yes that is right. Not at all what I expected. Thanks a tonne for your help my friend. Just saved me some cash too :)

@jms703: I have this board. The board does not have graphics. But the board doesn't need it, since most of the Sandy Bridge CPUs have IGP. The processor you mentioned, the G620 has IGP. I know this because I have the same board and CPU. I'm very happy with this setup. Yes, that is what I stated.  However, when you mount an expansion card in the PCIe slot, it disables the IGP on the processor (the x16 lanes are shared with the IGP).  That would mean no graphics if the PCIe x4 NIC is mounted.

That should be supported by the axe(4) driver: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=axe&sektion=4&manpath=FreeBSD+8.1-RELEASE What is it not doing? Steve

I thought that ended up being a BIOS issue, or someone needed to set hw.acpi.handle_reboot to 1.

Just a matter of a slow CPU, crappy NICs, and too much throughput for those two things. Replacing the Realtek NICs with good ones would reduce that, though you may just be trying to do more with a slow CPU than is reasonable and need a faster one (depends on how much traffic you're pushing and what kind of CPU that is).

Thanks, I have decided to change the NIC with these PWLA8391GTBLK (Intel), but now the system is crashing every 5-6 hours. The system had run correctly for a week then start crashing. I'm posting on another thread for that issue. Thanks

If you want to pick up on the project, you're welcome to do so, but you'll have to start by building your own image and doing some fixing of the build tools in the pfsense-tools repo at https://github.com/bsdperimeter/pfsense-tools

Ah, thanks for reporting back.  :) Any chance you could post some more detailed info like the relevant line from pciconf or bootup messages? It's useful to be able to compare pci vendor and device IDs. Steve

My fault, it's gzip -dc

Any more news on this board? I'm currently trying to spec out a new system and the board you listed does sound like it could be what I'm looking for.

In my home I run pfSense from an SD card, it is slow as dirt, writing seems to be under 1MB/sec and reading around 15MB/sec. But everything runs fine including SNORT (note: management i.e. starting, stopping, updating rules seems to take approx 1-2 minutes). If you want to use Squid you should use it with no cache. My only complaint is the webui locking up when something takes place. E.g. start snort from webui and I can't view DHCP leases until snort is done starting, but reboot system and I can use the webui when snort is starting up.

Yeah, the lcd is great. Even if it was shot (poor choice of words) you could still use it for parts. The LCD itself is a nice display, then you have the ram, power supply, CPU, VPN card, poor watchguard :-( Should be renamed to pfGuard – the watchguard runs pfSense much better then the software it was designed for.

FYI- This is covered on the doc wiki, and in the squid FAQ.

I actually did clean it out and changed the paste when I put the T5500 in it to replace the T2400 it had in it. Thank you for all the help.  :)