Overkill machine (Spanking new i5, SATA only) won't install to SATA
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I'll try the 2.1 Beta, since that seems to the the closest to an answer I've seen. Untangle 9.4 possibly being the other, but I'd prefer not to, since they deliberately brain-deadify things.
Yup, sure, you can install it to an old clunker. My old clunkers are really old and clunker-ish, and this is an important position in our network, so I tossed a nice new Core i5 3470 on an intel DQ77MK mobo with 16 Gb ram and 500 Gb spinny-type disk at it (no suicidal SSD here, thanks) - has to be SATA, there is no IDE/PATA or SCSI here. Idea being, get a good one and leave it alone for a few years.
pfSense doesn't need all that, you say - and I say, but Squid can sure make use of it, and a beefy squid cache is a large part of what the box is supposed to do. If I can cache Apple and Windows system updates, even and especially the big ones, it makes a HUGE difference to my network. In addition, I never have run Snort in the past in part because it's a resource hog, but I'm starting to have reason to think I should - etc.
Anyway, the 2.02 amd 64 LiveCD dies with the helpfully misleading message that it can't find a disk and I should exit to the shell on the LiveCD and read a README file that does not appear to exist (when I exit to LiveCD shell and look around for it) if I want to install to a non-IDE/SCSI disk.
I've searched around a little and the best bet I can come up with is hope 2.1 will work, see if untangle will and use it for now while hoping for updates, or dive off yet another deep end I'm not sure I have time for and go the VM route - else chuck it all and head back to a very clunky clunker.
Did I miss any? Is anyone else successfully using non-junque class hardware under this, and if so, how?
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plenty companies run pfsense on high-end server hardware … it's not a matter of new or old hardware.
the hardware used has to be on the Freebsd compatibility list, else there could be issues. -
Maybe try to put the drive / SATA controller in to an IDE emulation mode rather than AHCI. At very worse, maybe pick up a cheap SATA card, doesn't need to be fast, so either standard PCI or PCI-Express would work as long as it's on the compatibility list, which most normal SATAII adapters should be.
(Well, doesn't matter if it's PCI or PCI-Express as long as it's the only thing on the PCI bus, assuming your other NIC is PCI-Express, it should still get upwards of 100MB/s over the PCI bus.)
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2.1 Beta installed to the SATA Disk with no Bios Changes.
Now to see if I can get something somewhat stable built on it with enough packages to be useful.
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$5 says it's a BIOS setting.
The processor, chipset, and other stuff you listed work in other folks' builds. I use a Q77 chipset on an i3 in my build with a SATA drive, no problems.
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Changing SATA from AHCI to IDE in BIOS was indeed, it.
After having multiple problems which may or may not have anything to do with the 2.1 BETA distribution [working, installed & configured squid and snort (just reporting, not supposed to be blocking anything), they say they are running (and squid reports nothing), still working, then just randomly (or more like I haven't found the pattern yet) stops routing, reinstall would cure but removing packages/rebooting would not] I have changed the bios settings for SATA and 2.02 RELEASE does, indeed, now install (and for the record, if the bios is changed back again after installing, partially boots and then dies, not surprising but I thought I would check, since it didn't take long to try and see it fail.)
On to further joy with trying to get new systems doing what they are supposed to with limited test facilities (unless I want to break a network while I test, I'm limited to parking the WAN on the LAN of the network I'm not trying to configure this box's LAN to be while setting things up, so there's the added potential for problems from double NAT while doing the testing.) I suppose I should see if my mysterious stoppages happen when not installing squid/snort, but squid/snort are definitely supposed to be part of the package here - always possible that the package distributions don't really work right with 2.1 yet, which is why I'm heading back to the release version for phase two(point zero two) of beating my head against the wall.
Thanks!
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I've had a default installation of snort take out the entire network. Even after uninstall the box is down. Snort's FW block rules are time-based and persist even after uninstallation. I'm not sure if this is a fact, but it was the root cause for my non-routing box. I had to reinstall snort, remove all of the rules, purge the block list, and then uninstall for routing to work again. I've learned the hard way that snort is not 100% out of the box "set and forget" friendly. Add one rule at a time and review the logs. Lots of people take out their network thinking snort is "set and forget".