If you're going for an external AP, I'd recommend a Ubiquiti Unifi.  Read Amazon reviews… Good stuff

@Clear-Pixel: The majority of people running Pfsense are very technically inclined individuals which at some point will want to use options which are available to extend there firewall beyond a normal consumer firewall. For an individual that just wants a cool Pfsense firewall for bragging rights, yea maybe a Atom platform is right for them. But if they want to extend there firewall they will find they have limited themselves by using the Atom platform. For myself, I just wanted the ability to run my VPN directly on the router without a loss of bandwidth attributable to the CPU in the router in addition to enterprise-grade wireless.  There isn't a single consumer-grade router that could perform the VPN aspect.  Even the coveted Asus Dark Knight couldn't.  A sad state of affairs indeed.

Ok had a question: Based on what I read, seems like there is some confusion on whether it is possible to run virtualization (ESXI) on Atom-based boards.  What I would want is pfSense running (only having 2 OpenVPN instances running) as well as an instance of XP with Maximus Arcade / AirPlay Server / Plex

Since this topic still comes up in Google searches: You can use a 2.1 snapshot if you need to use this NIC. There are other forum threads that talk about compiling the driver and adding it yourself, but at this stage, using 2.1 is easier and preferably than manually hacking in a new driver.

Currently I'm using the adapter for something else, as I moved  pfSense to different hardware. Therefore I'm not able to do tests for you atm.

I use an Ivy Bridge system for my router. Initially I had an i3-3220, but changed it to an i5-3570 since I had it laying around and also it has AES-NI, which will be handy once 2.1 is out. The i3 system typically draws about 20w or so when not doing much. I am using a small ssd for storage and an 80+bronze 300w psu for it. It is a perfect little system. If you want to go cheaper there are options like the Pentium G1610 which is still 22nm Ivy Bridge based but a lot cheaper.

edrias: Bear in mind that the microserver only comes with one (broadcom(bge0)) NIC and although you can use vlans if you have a managed switch, its better to fill up the spare slot with a dual NIC. I had the early version of the microserver (1.4ghz?) setup with esxi and it struggled with 3 vm's, the limitation is not the memory (upto 16GB supported) but the cpu, because of that I use it now purely for storage (iscsi for vm etc etc). For bare metal use for pfsense its more than enough, especially if you add more NIC. Just my experience.

1. install usb_modeswitch http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,46329.msg247933.html#msg247933 2. Create a file  /tmp/e372.txt ######################################################## # Huawei, newer modems DefaultVendor= 0x12d1 DefaultProduct=0x1505 TargetVendor=  0x12d1 TargetProductList="1001,1406,140b,140c,1412,141b,1433,14ac,1506,150f" CheckSuccess=20 MessageContent="55534243123456780000000000000011062000000100000000000000000000" 3. call``` usb_modeswitch -c /tmp/e372.txt 4\. Configuring 3G modems [http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Configuring_3G_modems](http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Configuring_3G_modems) it worked for me

@tim.mcmanus: Any particular reason why you stayed with the 32-bit version over the 64-bit version?  You probably won't need it, but having access to that additional 4GB of RAM you have installed would be nice.  :) Thank you for your reply  :) No, not at all; not at all. This 'historically' grew like this. I started at X64, then had loads of problems (described high-level in the above), and then decided, in order to eliminate possible causes, to start at X32 (perceived by me, probably rubbish due to my noob-ness, as 'more safe').  So I built on that, and arrived at the final: after 1 week of smooth running, I will probably enjoy it for a couple of weeks to recoup from the 'horrors' (well, the frustration was really severe) of the past couple of months. After that, I will do a reinstall of X64 2.0.3. I have no reason whatsoever to think that that will turn into a nightmare, now that I have new hardware and at the same time know how to deal with my ISP. Thanks again for your reply, Bye,

Actually, looks like the list was updated: http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Known_Working_3G-4G_Modems Verizon Pantech UML290 appears to be working with documentation: http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Verizon_UML290

I more or less gave up on this one and got an Alix box. It works like a charm.

dynamic IP I deleted the virtual machine and created another, the new is working. I have no idea what happened the other machine.

Checking out the passmarks for the Celeron C1007U it looks good. My HP EliteBook 2530p Laptop which is 4 years old, and I expect another 4+ years of service out of it, scores 846 on the Single Thread Performance. But its very unfortunate GIADA limited there board to a single memory channel. As for FreeBSD and single threaded performance, it may very well be true today, but if I purchase a new PC platform I think of the present and Future. As for the Atom platform, From a performance stand point I think its a waste of natural resources :( I try to think in Stereo at all times … no Mono for me.

@stephenw10: @MHzTweaker: I had read somewhere that the CPU performance benchmark I wanted to look at was the single thread bench pertaining to pfSense. This is due to the single threaded nature of the 'pf' process at the heart of pfSense. The limit of your boxes performance is likely to be the speed at which this can be run. If you are running other cpu intensive processes such as Snort and Squid then multicore cpus help. @MHzTweaker: OK just did the hardware upgrade. I did not notice before on the old A8N-SLI board but on the new one pfSense would not find my SSD to install to with AHCI turned on. I had to install as an IDE device on the SSD. Is this normal? It can be. Which version of pfSense have you installed? 2.1Beta has newer drivers and may be able to talk to your drive in AHCI mode. It's unlikely to make much difference though. Steve I am running the 2.0.2 stable version. I am sure I am losing the newer features such as NCQ running in IDE mode. I do not know if it is a chipset issue of a UEFI BIOS problem. I am just impressed at the performance after the mobo/i3 CPU/RAM update.

@asterix: For a few more $$ you could had built an i3 system which would be much more powerful, less power consuming and would go an extra mile when you start experimenting on installing more resource intensive packages at a later time. AMEND brother…. And users seem not to be aware that you do have PowerD function in Pfsense ::) http://www.unix.com/man-page/FreeBSD/8/POWERD/ https://wiki.freebsd.org/TuningPowerConsumption

Option 2 is best. Pfsense can handle multiple connections like that just fine and would be best for redundancy and load balancing. Option 1 is certainly doable but you would want to disable NAT on it and just do static routing. This would be similar to using a Cisco router in front of a PIX/ASA firewall (which don't really support multi-wan IIRC). Given that pfsense does support multi-wan, I see no reason to do option 1. If you had at least a /29 on one of those connections you could do a redundant pfsense setup. Only the circuit with the /29 range would be available on both firewalls, the other circuit would be on the primary firewall only.

Ah, sorry, forgot to mention that I am running the latest BIOS.

Multiple Broadcom NICs in a Dell server, try this: http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Tuning_and_Troubleshooting_Network_Cards#Broadcom_bce.284.29_Cards Steve This solved my problem. Maybe I should have googled a little bit more  :-\ Thanks guys for your help