Just cant get pfsense to work with my box

[tinoy69]

hi to all

its been nearly 1 month now and i'm trying to experiment pfsense (1.2.2 FINAL) and just cant get it to work continously (getting a lot of read dma timeout errors) plus sometimes, pfsense just hangs on startup, can't access the gui followed by a reboot on pfsense, sometimes, internet is just so slow…

these are my specs

intel 2.4 socket 478
asrock mobo
512mb ddr1
samsung 40gb hdd

interfaces are...

realtek built-in nic
2 intel pro 100 nics

also, at startup, built-in lan and 1 of the intel nics share the same irq, can this be the source of the problem?

tried to swapping the nics in other slots, but to no avail, can this be overridden in irq assignments in startup?

really want pfsense to work, because of load balancing

is my hardware incompatible with pfsense? do i need to change the box? please help me...

btw, also tried other version of pfsense

1.01 - no errors but cant get load balancing to work
1.2.3 RC1 - bug with dhcp, other computers cant connect to my mp3server while in 1.2.2 its fine...

[jimp]

DMA timeouts generally suggest hard drive or storage issues.

Either you have a failing hard drive, a bad cable, or possibly a buggy controller.

It may help to disable DMA, as suggested in the Boot Options article on the Doc Wiki:
http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Booting_Options

[tinoy69]

jimp:

will try disabling dma and test it thouroughly first, then will post what ever happens…thanks for the suggestion...

[wallabybob]

Have you tried one of the 1.2.3 snapshot builds? Some people have found they work better than earlier builds.

[jimp]

@wallabybob:

Have you tried one of the 1.2.3 snapshot builds? Some people have found they work better than earlier builds.

While that may be a generally good suggestion, given the errors this person was seeing, a thorough hardware test would be the first step. DMA errors are never "normal".

Although there are some hardware implementations that clash with drivers, especially some IDE to CF adapters, usually the answer is to disable DMA since it is usually more of a hardware problem than a driver problem.