@MarioCaires: MSI AM1I AMD Mini ITX Motherboard AMD APU Sempron 2650 Dual Core Processor, Socket AM1, 1.45GHz, 25W DDR3 4Gb RAM What do you think of this in terms of performance? Is it going to be enough in terms of the APU? Yes!  I had exactly those parts and even at 4x your connection speed it will be more than enough.  It will even saturate your connection with OpenVPN on one core if you want to do that.

If you want to use it as an AP, it's not going to work. From the man page, no mention of hostap iwm supports station mode operation.

You've got 4 options: install realtek's driver buy a new NIC buy a new machine install a different OS

@AndrewZ: What is the problem exactly? As I mentioned multiple times all the 'newer' Huawei modems like 3272/3276/3372 should work. None of the  'newer' Huawei modems does not work reliably. Here the discussion: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=192345 There Patch: https://bz-attachments.freebsd.org/attachment.cgi?id=145319

Inst all the mSATA Change the boot order in the BIOS install from USB USB Stick to mSATA reject the USB Stick and reboot again pfSense-netgate-memstick-serial-2.3.2-RELEASE-p1-amd64.img.gz pfSense-netgate-memstick-serial-2.3.2-RELEASE-p1-amd64.img.gz.sha256 This is yours, the lastest stable with Serial console Support.

@BlueKobold: Well, after doing some research, I discovered the Dell Opticplex I would need to meet the requirement of having PCLe 2.0 x1 would cost $450 - 500 or more. The look more for a small Xeon D-15x8 platform such as the SYS-E200-D8 or SYS-E300-D8 or something similiar like this perhaps a self made one. It is the best bet for low power and/or real 1 GBit/s. Also a small Xeon capable mini-ITX board will do that Job right. Well BlueKobold, I am changing my mind again…now thinking of a Dell PowerEdge R710 (used)...it's less than half of the price of a Mac Mini quad core i7 (used)...however, it's a serious overkill for my home/office...fun toy to play with though.

Well, I'm not sure I figured it out, but I'm up and running, nonetheless. To get around the problem, I decided to perform a full install on a PNY SSD that Best Buy had on sale today.  I figured, if it was a problem with the USB interface, or pfSense's mounting/unmounting of the USB drive, then this would get around it. I was wrong. Here are all the different issues I saw in total, starting with trying to run NanoBSD. When trying to run NanoBSD: I couldn't get the BIOS to boot the USB when using:   Windows, extract with winRAR, burn with disk imager   Windows, extract with winRAR, burn with rufus   Windows, extract with 7zip, burn with disk imager   Windows, extract with 7zip, burn with rufus I DID get the BIOS to boot the USB, using OSX, with the terminal command 'gzcat pfSense-blahblah-image-name.iso.gz | sudo dd of=/dev/rdisk3 bs=1m'.  However, this is where I ran into the issues detailed in the original post. Fast forward to this evening, when trying to run a full install: Again, I couldn't get the BIOS to boot the USB with any of the combinations above, this time INCLUDING OSX.  Frustration!! I decided to go 'old school' and burn the ISO to a DVD.  STILL wouldn't boot!  At that point I determined it had to be something funky with the BIOS settings, because I noticed these devices weren't even showing up under the BOOT tab of the BIOS settings, like I'm used to seeing. I started playing around with BIOS settings, I found, under the BOOT tab, a 'Compatibility Support Mode (CSM)' that was disabled.  I enabled it, and I set all newly displayed options to "Legacy Only".  Save settings and reboot into BIOS.  EUREKA, the boot tab shows both the DVD drive and the USB drive as bootable devices!  I proceeded with the USB drive, installed pfSense to my SSD, and now I'm up and running.  Fingers crossed, I haven't seen any issues. The reason I stated that I'm "not sure if I figured it out", is because after finding that BIOS setting, I never tried to run a NanoBSD setup to see if my original issues were gone.  The only conclusion I can come to is: 1.  BIOS settings were incorrect, causing it to not recognize boot devices, when that boot device was created with Windows/image writer or Windows/rufus. 2.  Somehow OSX wrote the NanoBSD image to the USB drive in such a way that the BIOS recognized it, and booted, but pfSense didn't like it for some reason, causing the issues in the original post. 3.  Once I changed the BIOS settings to recognize the boot devices, I can only assume that running NanoBSD using a USB drive written using rufus, etc. would have worked just fine, and I wouldn't have needed to buy the SSD in the first place. As it is, I'm completely happy running a full install, and I hope that all the "pfSense killing SSD" gloom and doom posts are blown out of proportion considering today's hardware being vastly superior to legacy SSDs. Sorry for the long-winded post, but if anyone else runs into these issues, I wanted to document my experience, and how I got going, before the information falls out of my brain (ie, tomorrow).

spend a bit more and try to get something i3/i5 or above with more pcie slots for intel lan cards from ebay zoltac ci323/5 would be a bit more, but not break the bank

SYSTEM UP AND RUNNING THANKS ALL

@messerchmidt: looks like a pi1 type device with dual nics [image: c14.jpg]

@pfBasic: @VAMike: @pfBasic: If you can't afford the i350, http://www.databug.com/45W1959-p/45w1959.htm but do remember that those old parts ran a lot hotter/drew more power than the newer generation nics Very true, the PRO/1000 quad port draw almost 2.5x the power of the i350-t4v2, it's also just generally not as good. About all it has going for it is it's cheaper (to buy). Well, it's also a simpler part that might end up with less freebsd driver flakiness (see 2.4 dev threads). Seeing how much people completely lose their minds over freebsd re(4) driver flakiness I guess that's worth something in itself.

@FranciscoFranco: Well I have a SolidRun Hummingboard i4Pro which has "gigabit ethernet" that only manages 320megabit. so I wouldn't get too excited about these. @FranciscoFranco…FYI, the Ethernet issue is a known problem on the processor that the SolidRun's Hummingboard is based on, NXP's i.MX6. Check out ERR004512 in the errata document: http://cache.nxp.com/assets/documents/data/en/errata/IMX6DQCE.pdf It states that there is an internal issue that limits the GigE port to 470Mbps. In the real world limit is closer to 400Mbps and that is heavily optimized, so I would expect less than that in most implementations. I believe this is fixed in subsequent generations of the processor and other families (i.e. i.MX7, i.MX8, QorIQ, LayerScape).

My windows 10 desktop is a ESXi guest with gpu and hba passthru.

Yeah, thats what I did. But I sold the APU now since it was fine and bought a C3750G 24T for the money. Still using one of those Netgears as access and distribution switch for the building - works fine trunked over LACP with the Cisco. Ran into some other issues with the HP server now - bce driver going ham. Will open a new thread for that though or just replace the NICs with Intels..

It has a Xeon processor and quite cheap in total.

https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=10201.0