Pfsense on Thinkpad x40 [Solved]
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I have recently installed pfsense 1.2.2 on an IBM thinkpad x40 1ghz w/ 768mb ram and Buffalo lpc-cb-clx cardbus NIC.
Firewall and routing are performing great, but I am experiencing a few issues which I think are related.
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The system freezes when I close the lid. After closing the lid the system no longer responds to pings and after opening the lid I can see the command menu but there is no keyboard response requiring a hard reset.
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The system hangs on reboot and shutdown sequences. It will complete the sequence up to the last part, for example hanging on the message "rebooting…".
All power saving features are disabled in the bios.
I decided to try putting the laptop in the docking station and this somehow resolved all of the above issues. The problem is that I only have one docking station for two x40's (I use the other x40 for my work) so I may sometimes need it for the other laptop.
I tried disabling acpi from the command menu and also by adding the line hint.acpi.0.disabled="1" to /boot/device.hints but this made the system unstable and freeze up before I could test.
I also tried to prevent the laptop from sleeping when the lid is closed by adding the line hw.acpi.lid_switch_state=S0 to /etc/sysctl.conf, but this also failed to resolve the issue.
Could anyone provide some insight on how to get pfsense to work on this thinkpad without requiring the docking station?
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Issue was solved by installing the Thinkpad Configuration Utility in Windows -> Drive Bay -> Disable. Fortunately I have another x40 that runs Windows so I just switched out the hard drives to do this. Everything working great now.
For people who find this thread through google I will post a few performance details. The x40 is functioning as a router/firewall/Nat device on my home internet line (40-50mbps line, fiber -> VDSL). Using bittorrent I loaded up 60 torrents (tv shows) and cranked up the max connections. While downloading around 45mbps with about 3,000 open states the cpu (pentium M 1ghz) was at 50% and memory usage (768mb physical memory) was around 15%.