Not meaning to hijack this thread. Just wanted to pitch in to this great community. i3/i5 system is not going to suck up $20/month of power. More like $2 o r$2.5 (use PowerD !!) even if you keep hammering the router with 30+ users. That's about $24 to $25 a year. Still cheaper than the under powered Atom junk. I used an i3 system for 6 months and now using i5 with 8GB RAM since past 3 months.. Haven't noticed much of a change in my electric bill. Keeping in mind I have now close to 50 network hungry bulldog users, dual WAN 100/16Mbps (50/8Mbps each) internet, 4 VLANs and network is hogged up 80% or more 24/7. Also to add on top of that, I am running Snort on both WANs, HAVP, Squid, SquidGuard & LightSquid. All this is in a small Thermaltake enclosure. Of course you don't need or want this. But keep in mind that later on if you don't need pfSense to run on it, you can turn it into a full blown desktop or Hackintosh.

The FreeBSD hardware support list is useful but its not an exhaustive list. That is, there are supported devices which aren't on the list.

802.11n is not supported in FreeBSD 8.1 and hence not supported in pfSense 2.0. However there are a number of chipsets which support 802.11n which can be used in pfSense 2.0 in "802.11g compatibility" mode. I think you have two options: If you really want 802.11n features use a 802.11n capable external AP Use a 802.11g mini-PCI card "for now" and upgrade it to 802.11n card when pfSense supports it and you need the 802.11n features. I have read reports of Atheros 802.11n capable chipsets working with pfSense but can't provide any further information.

http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Full_install_on_Netgate_Hamakua Somehow you have to create another partition to have that work. Follow that guide and It works very smoothly. Thanks for everybody's help !

Hello, I have the exact same issue, It is happening with three different Toshiba drives that I got. I guess there is some problem somewhere with these HD. The issue is described more precisely here : http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,41127.0.html This is really weired. Because using another HD from another brand, I don't seem to have this problem. Have you finally been able to move on with your install ? Keep me updated. Thx.

@ozric: Does everyone know if there are 1gbit cx 10 nics supportet? I need a 10gbit link to our switch with pfsense. Best regards Cards based on the 82598EB will work.  You're going to need a monster box to actually push 10Gb of traffic though, and depending on your typical packet size, it may not actually be possible, regardless of the CPU. EDIT:  Clock-for-clock, the fastest CPU right now is the Intel Xeon E3-1290, so if anything could do 10Gb it would be this.  The E3-1270 is only 200Mhz slower and about 1/3 the price, so I'd probably go with one of those unless this is a "price is no object" problem.  Going wide and accepting a slower clock speed will hurt you on pf and ipfw performance, so don't think you can throw a dual or quad socket system with 16 or 32 cores at this and have it work.

Duly noted sir.  ;D  Only need either of the 2 for now but I'll see if I can snitch a free T7400 from my friend.

http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,40399.0.html this information might be relevent to you?

Hi wallabybob, it seems like I'm the only one who runs pfSense on this VIA MB or has problem with it. I've found just this thread on this forum :) We'd noticed this behaviour seems like the LAN Bypass feature is turned on - luckily we'll maybe have a chance to check the BIOS configuration and revision tomorrow. I'll let you in.

@wallabybob: The FreeBSD man page for the driver for the Atheros USB WLAN chips doesn't list AP mode as supported. See http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=uath&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+8.2-RELEASE&arch=default&format=html The cheapest Atheros PCIe card I know of is the TP-Link TL-WN781N which is a 802.11n card. 802.11n is not yet supported in FreeBSD but some pfSense users have reported that they have had Atheros 802.11n cards working with pfSense 2.0 builds but without 802.11n features. This card is available from retail outlets near me for less than the local equivalent of US$20. At the price its probably worth trying. The FreeBSD man page for ath, the driver for some Atheros chipsets indicates the multiple hostap feature is not available on all supported chipsets. I've been a satisfied user of an Atheros based PCI WLAN card for a few years. I have no experience of the TL-WN781N which I have suggested. Good info :) I guess i will just have to pick one up and hope for the best. Thanks a lot for your help. If any one else want to have a say, don't hesitate :)

@pf2.0nyc: Those Dell boxes are great platforms - cheap, easy to fix, easy parts, etc. Why not buy two and keep them side-by-side "just incase"?? I was thinking of that. I am not sure if they have any more left though….

@XIII: There is a standard to have WOL integrated into the PCI bus, so the cable is no longer required Thanks. I looked up the Wikipedia article on Wake on Lan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN) which says the WOL capability came into PCI 2.2. My NICs with WOL cable almost certainly pre date PCI 2.2. The Wikipedia article says WOL may need to be enabled on Linux through Ethertool but doesn't discuss FreeBSD. @pf2.0nyc: I do see that it should be possible however when I power down my system and send a magic packet to the NIC it does not wake up the machine. It might be worth doing a web search for FreeBSD WOL and reading the Wikipedia article for troubleshooting hints.

@Cry: I'd suggest that you'd be better off buying a supported network card. I've had good results with pfSense 2.0 snapshot builds and Tenda W311U and TP-Link WN321G. Both available retail from neighbourhood computer shop for well under the local equivalent of US$20. It appears the current revision of the WN321G uses a different chipset to the one in my revision but others apparently have the new revision working. One user has reported seeing panics on enabling the W311U but I haven't seen this problem. Both these devices support Access Point mode but a number of the other supported USB WiFi NICs don't support AP mode.

Also you wont get much help hear mixing a NAS with a firewall I dont think. For secuirty reasons its best to have them sperated.

FreeBSD 8.1 didn't show it support for it. So, I would choose an another card

I would expect that if you have two identical motherboards with the same BIOS version, you number ports on multi port cards the same way (e.g. always increasing port number as you go away from the mother board) and you move the cards from one motherboard to another such that the card in slot "n" goes to slot "n" in the new motherboard then the FreeBSD device name of a port on a card would be unchanged. As I think I explained earlier, if you add or remove cards the unit numbers of existing ports is likely to change. If you have a number of identical systems (same motherboard, same BIOs etc) and you configure them with the same types of cards in the slots (e.g. all mother boards have a 2 port PCI card in slot 2 etc) then I would expect all ports in the same position to have same name across all systems (e.g. port 3 in slot 2 is called em4 on all systems). However this is one caveat: As best I know ALL Intel GigE PCI chips are handled by the em driver. I believe SOME Intel GigE PCIe chips are handled by the em driver and others by the igb driver. Its possible some PCIe GigE cards have a different chips than other PCIe cards with the same number of ports so it may be a particular PCIe 2 port card provides em <n>and em <n+1>while another PCIe 2 port card might provide igb <n>and igb <n+1>and that can affect the naming of ports on other cards. If you think you have found a configuration that violates what I have written I'm happy to take a look but I would need at least the output of pfSense shell command pciconf -l -v from both systems and a very clear indication of the difference (e.g. motherboard LAN port is em0 in the first configuration and em9 in the second).</n+1></n></n+1></n>

Just so everyone is aware the TP-LINK TL-WN321G works great with pfSense 2.0 RC3! Thanks so much for everyone's help!