Ah well that's a different matter then. When is this happening? Is there anything in the logs? Steve

Hi, I finally managed to fix this problem by disabling the onboard sound, and reducing the memory allocated to the video board. This thin client seems to be running pretty well and the only real problem was getting the intel dual lan card to fit into the riser card as the card had a full height bracket (A quick cut with the  hack saw fixed that) Thanks for looking Richard

Makes sense, but to be honest, not sure if you guys have seen the prices lately, a lot of HQ rack servers out there for cheap, I'll probably stick with the processors and get a smaller 32GB ram version per your advise (I know it's probably still overkill), you can easily get one of these for a couple of hundred bucks. Besides, I'll probably run some sort of IPS so since everybody's saying it's gonna use up a lot of CPU, I guess I'd rather be safe than sorry. For the switches I guess the Cisco 2960 looks good. Might try that myself and prices are ok. Though I have to ask, how come you're not able to get 100 mbps over 100 mbps link if your server is under utilized? What's the bottleneck holding it back?

i use x520-DA2 cards in my freebsd file servers (zfsguru is on freebsd 9.1) and there i had to tweak some buffers as well, otherwise the link would not come up. kern.ipc.nmbclusters=262144 kern.ipc.nmbjumbop=262144 Kern.ipc.nmbjumbo16=32000 Kern.ipc.nmbjumbo9=64000 I got this info from: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=24723

Please, test the modules from this post: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,20095.msg346347.html#msg346347

We are using CARP with two dell poweredge R610 with bi-CPU E5506 and 16Gb of memory. It has been running well for us. It handle: a 650Mbps WAN which average at 200Mbps and can peak to 600Mbps for a few hours which generate ~70TB of traffic/month 50000+ states, ~60 simultaneous OpenVPN users, 4 IPSec tunnel (3DES 256bits)

Thanks.  That's good to know.  I won't start for a few weeks yet, but it's interesting how much harder things are to find when you don't use current tech.  "The long forgotten LGA775."  :)

Right, so I bought the Intel LAN Card mentioned above, installed it in the target hardware, and ran LiveCD with both 2.0.3, and 2.1. It seems to be running fine, no hiccups.

thanks for the feedback everyone!  will stick with the old reliable for this round as everyone suggests..

@dkozel: Then this CF card for all three systems: http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Extreme-CompactFlash-Memory-SDCFX-004G-X46/dp/B004UC9HSA 4GB should be more than plenty even for dual booting test versions or just having fun. It supports UDMA which I understand used to be problematic sometimes. Has support changed or is that still not entirely working? Well, I tried with this one and… $ dmesg | grep -i dma atapci0: <amd cs5536="" udma100="" controller="">port 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6,0x170-0x177,0x376,0xff00-0xff0f at device 15.2 on pci0 ad0: 1919MB <cf 20110221="" 2gb="">at ata0-master UDMA100</cf></amd> [image: bdpdec.png]

wallabybob, Sorry for the confusion… The 4G modem is a Huawei E392. As I just started playing with pfSense, I am using the most recent version I could find at the site. And yes, there is a thread about it (http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,49549.0.html)where a fellow got it working installing usb_modeswitch. Moacir

50Mb fiber at home? I wish!  ;D This is for work. We currently have some bonded T1's for 10x10, however moving and also upgrading to a full 50x10 fiber circuit. The currently firewall is a small netgate and can work with the T1's but I could see it struggling with the new fiber. Rather build something that's 1U rack mountable. Anyone have links to builds? Like stated, Atom, 512 memory, cheap board, etc.

There have been reports of using, successfully, 1000+ VLANs with pfSense so it's not a problem with that directly. Perhaps some combination of a large number or VLANs and interface bridging?  :- Did you try any of the suggestions from the FreeBSD lists? Steve

Another nice command…thank you. Jun 21 00:41:35 pfsense syslogd: kernel boot file is /boot/kernel/kernel Jun 21 00:41:35 pfsense kernel: Copyright 1992-2010 The FreeBSD Project. Jun 21 00:41:35 pfsense kernel: Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 Jun 21 00:41:35 pfsense kernel: The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Jun 21 00:41:35 pfsense kernel: FreeBSD is a registered trademark of The FreeBSD Foundation. Couldn't find anything useful from log. There are hours (or more) between the time when reboot sequence start and previous log entry. The previous log entry is always different line, so no consistency there. I will try to swap HD, NICs etc. since I have another box with same hardware and see what gives. Thanks again, GBR

If you're looking for the command line it's option 8. Steve

@SunCatalyst: the other issue nobody has touched on is the NOISE factor with the 1u and 2u boxes… 1U are USUALLY pretty damn noisy (due to the fans) and if your using this in a home environment you may not be happy with the Noise. ALSO. if the OP is wanting to do Wire speed and Snort / Etc with 10GE  , your gonna WANT multiple cores. NOT a single core. and then theres ECC ram. The noise depends on the amount of fans, and the fan itself, but yes it makes to much noise for a regular home, But it is ment for co-location in a datacenter, Do not see any reason why to use a 10gbit lan at home :P about the, single core, I don't think anyone said a single core is better, they did say that snort uses by default a single core and it would be better to get a cpu with a high rating per core. But indeed, a quad core is required for that speeds. @Downloadski: @ilaurens: @Downloadski: you need to compile the driver for that intel 10 GE card i think. I have them in my zfsguru nas servers and in 1 it works the other not. That runs freebsd 9.1 and does not have the newest intel drivers included even. Further it is hard to fill up that 10 GE connection also, i only can put 350 Mbyte/sec through it (source system is not faster) Because you will have tweak parts yourself, take a look here this is one of the many things you can do to speed it up http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=42952.0;prev_next=prev also search on google: network tuning Thanks, i have no more problems now with the 10GE cards. I check the logs and it was caused by to low buffers for 10GE cards. No problem, glad it helped came across it when I was searching for info. Perhaps you can post your speeds here? @stephenw10: Yep. I would think that to do 10G Snort you are going to want all the processing power you can possibly muster!  ;) That's way out of my experience though. I was just pointing out that, due to pf's single thread, you need to look at a CPUs single thread rating rather than it's overall benchmarks. I.e. a 2 core, 4GHz CPU is likely to give faster throughput than a 48 core, 1GHz CPU even though such a CPU would have massive processing power on paper. That's ignoring the Snort requirement. Steve Yes, you are right, but well it depends how it's used. It's said a single core, is that per instance or per process, there is also something called PFRING which enables you to use multi threading for snort, but i'm not sure how to do that yet nor I have the space to setup a server at the moment :(

@sventunus Thanks for your input. Great to hear from someone actually using this Jetway box. I will look forward to hear your real world numbers if you get around to it. ;)

@stephenw10: How are your Xboxes connected? Wifi? If so run cables for a much better connection. Perhaps consider using Ethernet-over-powerline or ethernet over rf if your house is wired for that. This may come across as patronising so I apologise if it does; are you sure that Cinemanow is reporting Mbps and not MBps. 8x3.35 seems very close to your rated speed. Is the AC66R what you're currently using? Steve Thanks Steve, yes I'm using the AC66R right now, and my xboxes connected by wifi.. Thanks for your suggestion, I'm going to see if my house can use Ethernet-over-powerline. ;)