@stephenw10: By that logic before Sandy bridge was released no one could use any features of pfSense other than firewalling?  ;) You need to qualify that statement with a bandwidth requirement. Clearly if your WAN connection is, say, 10/1Mbps you can easily use a Alix board and have plenty of cpu cycles spare. @jimp: Indeed I have a number of Atom 330 1U pfSense boxes in the wild running squid, squidGuard, ntop, etc, and they are great performers. The CPU requirement depends completely on the amount of throughput you need (in PPS, or more generally, Mb/s), along with the number and type of services you want to run. Sweeping generalizations like that really aren't helpful to anyone. True, I stand corrected :) @stephenw10: Probably the number one reason is that you can build a completely passively cooled Atom system quite easily as it's maximum power dissipation is low. Although the average dissipation of a Sandy Bridge cpu is similar, perhaps even lower, the maximum is far higher so you must allow for that in your cooling solution. Yes, but can also be done with a SB setup. I still think a SB setup now is a better choice.

I don't see any trace of hostap even in FreeBSD 9 for iwi, so I wouldn't really get your hopes up. That driver you linked to is for Linux, so probably not possible to translate it over. Certainly less trouble to just get a supported card rather than fight the iwi.

@MMacD: You were able to get the S1200 with a G620 for $163?  When I look around, I can only see the board itself for that price.  Newegg wants $70 for a 620, bringing the price to ~$230. If the $163 was just for the board, what persuaded you to go with the G620, considering that it's the high-wattage choice (65W) compared to the D525 (13W) and the diff in total hw cost is minimal? No, that price was just the motherboard. I chose the Sandy Bridge chip because it gets SO much more done than an Atom for the same price. TDP should not be used to count real world power usage. It's not even remotely close. Fully loaded, I can't get my G620 to use more than 45 watts.

ups connected and detected properly but refuses to start :(

Thanks for all the info guys. I tried putting the msk on WAN however it would then just crap out hopefully 2.1 comes out soon.  So it currently is sitting on LAN but I might have another pci nic to replace until the fix.

Excellent! Thank you Stephenw10. The list brings another question regarding acpi, but I'lll start a new thread for that. Cheers!

@mhab12: We're about to get a new 100 mb internet circuit run to our office via existing fiber (currently at 5mb).  The CPE from the carrier has SFP ports available so I had them leave a multi-mode LC fiber SFP for us for a 'future' change from copper to fiber on the very short run from their switch to ours (in the same rack). Are there any advantages to fiber over copper on a link of this speed and short distance?  Reliability/latency/traffic handling/etc.?  Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Copper will likely be more reliable over such a short distance as fiber relies on optical transceivers and the laser diodes do fail.  And worse yet they often get flaky before completely failing.

All went well, I'm now on the Embedded nanobsd with vga. Thanks Steve ;D

@Nonsense: How were you able to overcome the network port driver issue in that motherboard?  I know there is a driver workaround out there, but I don't think it has ever been incorporated into the main software download. ??? There is no "network port driver issue". The NICs work fine.

@xanaro: motherboard $55: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138332 IBM / Intel PRO/1000 PT Dual Port Gigabit NIC Adapter PCI-E ~$55: http://www.ebay.com/itm/350513539530 If you're interested, you could spend a little more and get the Intel S1200KP motherboard for $170. C206 Chipset Dual Intel NICs (onboard) Low power. Mini-ITX. I have one and I'm happy with it.

@dreamslacker: Also, since the SD card is mounted as a USB device, you must set pfSense to boot from USB device or the system might timeout before loading the USB host. That's a good point, many (most?) modern motherboard SD slots are fed into the USB subsystem on the mobo, rather than a drive controller. Some economy USB-SD adapters I've had in the past take so long to initialise that they just won't boot on many boards -  I'm sure they use similar bad chips in the economy SD-SATA adaptors. If you're using d_rive-slot mounted_ plug-in SD-SATA or SD-PATA adaptors: On some motherboards I've come across I've had to go into the mobo BIOS and either  reduce the "HDD boot wait"* / "HDD delay"* to zero seconds or max it to around 30 seconds (no hard and fast rule, depends on many factors) This has enables some strange hardware to boot from a SD-SATA or sd-PATA adapter before timeouts/sleep states occur or give extra time for slow SD converter controllers to initialise. Not all BIOS have this boot wait setting, but has caught many people out using various SD adaptors. This is 1/fun (almost as frustrating as fighting with strange settings to boot PCs from USB years ago**), so I prefer CF adaptors whenever I can, which never seem to have this problem. HDD boot wait" / "HDD delay" is basically an extra spinup delay set in the motherboard BIOS for slow-starting drives or possibly for the SATA-spinup-in-sequence feature (which is to reduce the drive motor current current drawn from the power supply). The onboard drive contollers don't interrogate the drives until this extra delay is over; sometimes adding an extra 30 seconds is too much and any SD-SATA or SD-PATA card controllers go back to sleep. Conversely, some adapter controller chips need extra time for an internal initialisation. Similarly, disabling unused drives in the BIOS can have a similar effect if the SD adapter prefers a rapid POST/BIOS runup (because it saves a few seconds) If you find you need extra seconds for the SD adaptor to initialise after powerup, try setting all the drives in the BIOS to "Auto" to delay the startup a few extra seconds. ** moving motherboard jumpers so the USB ports weren't supplied power when the PC was off often helped USB booting problems (+5v running 24/7 is mainly for usb keyboard wakeup buttons, or nowadays charging your fone when the PC is off)

Sorry, I post in a wrong thread, please kindly ignore, thanks.

@cmb: Probably the easiest is to change over to VLANs on existing hardware, remove any reference to the physical interface that will be removed, then back it up and restore it. That's assuming you're keeping the same type of NICs. If not, you can either reassign after restoring or manually change in the XML before restoring. Thanks for the suggestions.  I'll give that a try.

FreeBSD is not Linux. In particular, the interfaces of kernel modules such as device drivers to the rest of the kernel are very different. The Linux driver will need substantial modification to work on FreeBSD.

Take a look on hardware compatibility list. http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.1R/hardware.html I preffer and suggest 64 bits installs. what kind of services you need to filter on this pfsense?

@kakashi: is it possible to create multi ip (each vlan) and overide dns for that multi ip with dns forwarder ? example : data.local.lan for ip vlan11 (192.168.2.100), ip vlan21 ((192.168.3.100) etc since freenas support vlan that easy to configure and hook to each vlan member. It might be possible with some DNS supported on pfSense but I can't se how it would be configured for dnsmasq through the web GUI. @kakashi: from ur advise its like no problem with cpu prosesor I didn't say that. I suggested you MIGHT get higher efficiencies through using a different NIC for the NAS. To be specific, some efficiencies MIGHT be gained through use of jumbo frames (I don't know if NAS supports jumbo frames on its NIC; I don't know if jumbo frames are supported on the pfSense NIC you intend to use) or use of interrupt moderation features of SOME intel Gigabit NICs. It has been stated a number of times in the pfSense forums that an Alix board is capable of pushing through about 80Mbps. Those boards have a 500MHz CPU, single core. I would be surprised if your system is really using 70% of the CPU if ALL it is doing is forwarding 80Mbps to or from the NAS. But I don't know what else it was doing when you took the figures you reported. I don't see an answer to my previous question: Is there a good reason why you haven't connected freenas to the same VLAN as host client so the traffic is handled by the switch alone? If the NAS was on the same VLAN as its clients (or even a significant number of clients) then they could talk directly through the switch without having to go through pfSense.

Just a quick update. The system I built for someone with the G620 is running fine. No regrets. So I wanted to build a 2nd system for myself at home, but change the processor to a Xeon E3-2130 or higher so that I could run a bunch of VMs on it. When I priced it out, a build-your-own Xeon system with the specs I needed was roughly the same price as a preconfigured HP Proliant ML110 G7 (the one with the E3-1240 CPU) for $720. So I bought the HP. It's small and quiet. I installed Fedora 16 on the box because I wanted to use Linux KVM for virtualization. I passed one of the 82574L NICs directly to the PFSense VM and it works great. Runs at 39-40 watts when idle and VMs running. (I didn't choose ESXi 5 because it doesn't like the ICH10R controller in the HP. It 'purple-screens'. I tried Xen, but its weird and I'd need to recompile PFSense for driver support. I decided on Linux KVM and I'm not looking back. It's fast. I also really like configuring my VMs from the command line. ESXi, Xen and even RedHat's RHEV (KVM-based commercial product) all require WINDOWS clients to administer.)

That chipset doesn't look to be supported yet even in the latest FreeBSD. http://wiki.freebsd.org/WiFi80211n pfSense is currently built on FreeBSD 8.1 so will not drive the AR9380. Steve

Took a while, but I finally have most things running.  I ordered the wrong disk adapter board at first… there's a difference between Micro SATA and mSATA.  Go figure.  Fantastic naming convention there by the way.  Not confusing at all.  I found the correct one on the second try and did the full install in a computer, remounted the SSD on the Soekris box, then fired it up.  Worked like a charm. I finally configured the wireless in the last hour, and though I have barely used it yet I have succesfully connected and browsed a few web pages using the Ubiquiti SR71-E as the wireless card.  So I can confirm that works.  Or has so far, anyway.  I am only running it in G mode, NOT N or A modes as I don't have any wireless hardware that runs those two modes to test with. I have OpenVPN setup and was able to successfully send traffic across the tunnel one time out of 10 attempts so far... I haven't tried again since that one success.  I did notice that while I was able to successfully connect prior to that success, I wasn't able to pass traffic across the VPN connection until I did a full reboot on the firewall.  Obviously something is not loading correctly.  I spent two nights working on it, and finally out of desperation I tried a restart and it just starts working.  YEAH!!!! To do: TX Power setting, I'm not sure what to set that at, so I'm reading up on that. IPSEC VPN from my android tablet: so far have been unable to make any connection at all.