What to do with Alix 2d3 USB ports

tenuhseegeek

I just got an Alix 2d3 board, set up configured and works fine. There are 2 available USB ports on it, is there anything I can use these for aside from using a usb wireless controller? Say a USB thumbdrive for logs or more frequent writes? or maybe a usb drive for sharing files?

jimp

There are USB wireless cards, USB 3G cards, external storage (though it's not supported in the GUI), USB serial adapters, USB UPS connections, etc, etc.

There are plenty of things to do with it. :)

tenuhseegeek

Will look into storage options, thanks. Now if only there was a NAS package around…

jimp

Ew. I wouldn't want that on my firewall. :-)

common

@jimp:

There are USB wireless cards, USB 3G cards, external storage (though it's not supported in the GUI), USB serial adapters, USB UPS connections, etc, etc.

There are plenty of things to do with it. :)

Sorry for my ignorance, but would a usb wireless card enable a pfsense box to act as a wireless router?

Thus:

Internet -> cable modem -> pfsense box ->wired eth connections AND wireless connections

?

jimp

Yes. If you have the right card. Many USB wireless devices don't support hostap mode though.

See my spreadsheet here:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AojFUXcbH0ROdHgwYkFHbkRUdV9hVWljVWl5SXkxbFE&hl=en

common

Nice spreadsheet!

Just a thought, are there any USB or wired cards that support promiscuous mode for use with wireshark?

jimp

That I don't know. I thought all of the wired ones did. Not sure about wireless.

wallabybob

@common:

Sorry for my ignorance, but would a usb wireless card enable a pfsense box to act as a wireless router?

Ralink has at least a couple of chipsets for USB devices that can act as an Access Point under pfSense but there are some issues:

pfSense 1.2.3 includes the rum driver for devices such as the TP-Link TL-WN321G. Unfortunately the rum driver is broken for hostap mode in pfSense 2.0 BETA at least in snapshot builds to around mid August (the last snapshot build I tested).
pfSense 2.0 BETA snapshot builds include the run driver for a newer generation of Ralink chipsets. Use of this device requires a simple tweak to load the firmware. I've used a Tenda W311U which seems to be satisfactory but another user has had less satisfactory experience with other devices supposedly supported by the run driver. See http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,27744.0.html for more details.