Thanks, thats great!

We are 'playing' with them and the more cards we can have the more it will be stable.

Smiggy,   Checked and they're all good.  I've seen caps go bad before.  All of these are fine.  No bulging or leaking anywhere. I even tried swapping out memory last night as a last resort test.  The system has been running fine all this time.  I've been using it as an X server for about 2 years now.

Thanks YeOldeStonecat! I have researched Untangle some. From what I have seen, there is no dual WAN option. I did find Endian with dual WAN but out of both pfSense appears to have a larger following. So for OCD people like me or noobs like me, the support from people like yourself is great! Do you think there is any advantages running a UTM vs. a ipCop, Smoothwall, pfSense, etc? Thanks again!

Nevermind,  I got everything working just fine. To answer my own question: I found a 1.2 final embedded img that had console directed to VGA which was then a snap to setup. Incidentally the Via Quad GbE pci nic was detected and fully functional. Seems like I now have a low power, but very powerful 4 GbE port pfSense router for under $200 :)

Other options include switching the fan for one that pushes enough air, but with less noise (I've done that plenty of times) or install an adjustable fan controller (inline).

Thanks for your help, turns out it appears to have been a hardware issue all along with the 2nd Nic port on 2 x units, managed to get hold of a third box this morning and it works fine. So looks like it is nothing to do with bsd thanks again for your help. will report back on how successful these are, small box the size of a full size cd rom with 2 x nic ports 1.2ghz processor & 1gb ram, no fans.

Thanks for the link :D I just measured the power draw from the wall socket - 30W average :| [peaks at around 40W when I do some heavy traffic, but only for a few seconds]. So that's good :D Any ideas on the LCDProc package?

@warpke: save some settings in the webinterface, while saving the filesystem gets mounted writable for a short while From : http://devwiki.pfsense.org/Tuning If you are running on embedded platforms, start of by issuing the command: /etc/rc.conf_mount_rw And when you are done editing files, issue the command: /etc/rc.conf_mount_ro This is only needed for embedded platform !

I bought one of the original gOS Everex $199 Walmart machines in 11/07.  I soon upgraded to 2GB RAM, put in a 340W power supply and put in a nVIDIA GeForce 6200 256mb PCI graphics card (supposedly the best PCI card you can get - not to be confused with PCI-e).  I then took out gOS and put in Ubuntu.  Total investment for everything including shipping was about $350.  I love it! It definitely performs comparable to any $500 - $700 unit on the market today.  Without the power supply and graphics card upgrade I could not take advantage of the awesome Linux eyecandy with Compiz.  It was my first experience with Linux and has created an extremely affordable hobby for myself for nearly a year as I've learned about the abilities of my machine and Linux.  I no longer use Windows (except for my wife's laptop in the kitchen).

@wallabybob: It may be a little late for the original poster but the topic http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,11485.0.html also includes a pointer to a page describing a 4 port PCI Gigabit card for US$99,. The NICs are supported in FreeBSD and one poster reports satisfactory performance. Yup, that's me. My 2 yrs old VT-6122 based NIC's running FBSD7.0 flawlessly. It was only less than $30. The following link should help you much. http://www.rasyid.net/2008/08/17/detect-rb44gv-on-freebsd-7/ cheers,

http://devwiki.pfsense.org/DevelopersBootStrapAndDevIso

http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,3246.0.html Read that datasheets to the cards mentioned in this thread.

What manufacturer/oem makes the hardware Rockboch is using?

I ended up talking to a dell rep who told me to Google dell open manage live cd i think. It runs CentOS and has dell open managed already on it. Good news, it was only chassi intrusion alerts with a few power supply outages….. ;-) Back to business!

Just to let you guys know : I've installed PFSense 1.2.1 about a month ago and it indeed fixed the problem. I've met a few crashes during the configuration of the boxes but it's been rock stable since. So, again, thanks for your help.