Atheros chipsets should usually work.

You should do some real life benches on this box. Hard to say what it will push. Not only the throughput but also pps rate will decide how much this system will be able to push. However as you are using some good nics and a good pci bus you should see quite some throughput on auch a box I think.

And those are not supported anyway as they only have 64 mb RAM.

Either.

You could always try puting the NIC in a windows box, downloading the setup utilities, and hard setting the uplink settings in firmware.

If your cards lights are cycling every 2-3 seconds that seems to me like either the bus is resetting the card, or the card itself is resetting. You might try manually assigning different IRQ's to the card and insuring that the PCI slot you are using is not shared by anything else like a COM IO chip or Sound chip or the like. Most desktop grade boards share 3/4 of their PCI slots with on board hardware. Dual/Quad nic's DO NOT LIKE this at all. If you notice, most DUAL/QUAD nic's will not run on PCI splitters installed on single PCI 1U servers. They have warnings in the manual about this. So if the PCI slot you have the card in is split with anything else, this may be leading to the behavior you're experiencing. I would turn off everything in the bios that's not completely necessary including com ports, parallel etc, freeing up IRQ's. Then make sure your card gets IRQ's that are not used by anything else. Also avoid IRQ 11/12 if you can. 12 being the PS2 port. Older boards favored IRQ 10 for the video card. IRQ3,4,5,7.9 should be free if you turn everything off.

You'll never see PCI ADSL modem support for 90 percent of the hardware out there. It's all soft-modem HSP/DSP type hardware that requires the driver to do the brunt of the work. Each time the driver loads it has to 'program' the firmware into the card soft loading instructions. By themselves the ADSL PCI cards are completely dumn. Some of the external USB modems are a bit smarter and just require the right generic usb driver and instructions sent via the usb data connection. That's probably why there's one working for m0n0wall. But if you're expecting winmodems to work in a freebsd firewall, you're probably wishing for something that will never come. Well I say never, but Connexant could start writing freebsd drivers for their cheap, neutered, and otherwise dumn hardware some day. You never know… The only reason Lucent DSP modem hardware worked in linux is because lucent released some framework for their soft modems for use in linux. That's my 10 cents and change. It's much the same as the wireless hardware out there. None of it will run very well without very specific firmware based drivers.

My recommendation would be to toss that nvidia piece of garbage out the nearest airlock and get a real platform to work with. First step is to get real nic's like intel 1000BT desktop nic's. My second recommendation would be to toss the motherboard and get an intel chipset or amd chipset board to work with. When you're working with linux/freebsd/unix any deficiency in hardware design like weak nic's, buggy acpi, broken bios, becomes blatantly obvious. Every piece of nvidia (read non video) hardware I've touched has been broken someway some how. And when I say broken, I mean completely broken hardware design that will never be fixed because linux/freebsd folk don't tend to fix broken hardware issues in software unless it's a fix provided by the vendor (nvidia) and that's not happening. The old nforce2's used to randomly lockup when you copied files between two hard drives and played an mp3 in linux and freebsd because the bus timer's were seriously broken. You'd get irq locking issues. They fixed this in software in the windows driver but the hardware stayed eternally broken. The nforce3's had crazy ACPI issues and the nforce4's would just randomly lockup due to mysterious NIC/bus issues. My recommendation would be to stay far far away from any nvidia chipset unless it's a windows only box. And even then, make triple backups of your data because the built in nvidia raid has a tendency to trash your data faster than you can install windows at times. (yes more defective junky nvidia board design). Basically, I've never seen an nvidia board work properly with linux/unix without something on it being broken. I would just find another platform to work with.

http://snapshots.pfsense.com/FreeBSD6/RELENG_1/

It has a broadcom chipset and I have heard people having some problems with some of these chips lately: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,2523.0.html (might have changed with the availability of freebsd 6.2 based snapshots). I recommend researching the appropriate freebsd lists for people having problems with this nic/chipset.

@hoba: Try to get a nice Intel quad nics. You can find them also labeled as dell/compaq/hp sometimes on ebay. Thanks man.  I'll try and see what I can do.

Hey, We've gotten it to run on ip330s and ip440s (the 400 series if not a 440).  The 650 does have video access but the card that plugs into the front of the unit with the cf card, harddrive and nics is difficult to control.  We have not been able to get one going yet even though we have tried booting via the hdd and the cf card. thanks, Jim

Please search the forum. these events are already discussed elsewhere.

Both Nortel and Cisco can be quite picky about autonegotiation and fall back to something in the order of 100mbit half duplex. Note I have a C2610 at work and it only has a 10Mbit port! You may fare better with the C1711. Good Luck

i'll just install it on another PC first

i know this thread is old. but anyone else tried to run healthd and others on smbus ? i tried but i think our kernel doesnt have device          smbus device          ichsmb device          smb device          iicbus device          iicbb device          intpm device          pcf device          acpi is anyone sure this is compile in ? we have acpi. but not smbus and smb and iicbus and iicbb.

I've been meaning to reply to this thread for months now as I did the testing immediately after seeing the original posting…. I used a Dell Precision 620 box that had a Pentium D - 830 (3.0 GHz) with 1 GB Ram for the testing.  With both cores enabled and listed, there were no slow-downs whatsoever.  Testing it in both 100mbit and 1000mbit modes passed without any issues at all.  I even upgraded to the later releases a few months back and had the same, good results. I am glad nexusone was also able to test out and report back positive results as well  :)

hmmm so may i know which version of 3com nic u have that have polling enabled ? i am using 3c905c-tx big chip version not the small bga chip type. may i now which one are u using pls.

Hardware is SO cheap these days that griping about performance on an almost archaic P3 machine is silly. Given that an off the shelf firewall with similar features/performance to pfsense will cost you thousands of dollars you might better serve your organization by doing some education on what things really cost rather than wasting time trying to squeeze more blood from a stone. If you want good performance invest in good hardware. EDIT :: For reference I still use a handful of P3 systems in critical applications without any trouble. However with traffic sometimes maxing my gigabit fiber connection my firewall isnt a place where I try to save money. It is THE MOST CRITICAL point of my network. For those with less demanding requirements less hardware will certainly do. I recently picked up a Dell poweredge server with dual p3-1.4ghz cpus and 2 gig of ram for 300 dollars. Even has a gig-e ethernet port and raid controller in it. Hard to go wrong with these machines. If you're on a budget look on ebay and you might be surprised at the class of machine that you can get for the money. Some of them even still have warranty coverage. Be sure to check the service tags on their support site.

I'll give this a shot and report.