Thanks for your comprehensive answer BlueKobold. Much appreciated!

I like how the RC batteries use a separate monitoring circuit for each cell. That must be better than gang charging and averaging.

@Atreides: The 2220 says it has GbE, does it not support a gigabit network? Where it says that? Here at the official homepage all hardware is shown and under each stands that they have "gigabit throughput", but not under the SG-2220. Link

You sure a N2930 is going to nat a 1Gbit WAN? Both, the Intel Celeron J1900 (04/2013) will do for 100% and the N2930 SOC will do it too, but it is newer (01/2014) also a dual core Celeron G3260T @3,2GHz will be able to realize the 1 GBit/s at the WAN & Snort but with more electric power usage. I only knows that the PPPoE is only running on a single CPU core and that might be dropping the throughput some, but if you are connecting to the Internet over a static public IP address it would be no problem.

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