PfSense with Gigabyte GA-J1900N-D3V
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Well i for sure will now try out the alix solution first.
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:<
I was hoping to get some feedback on the Gigabyte board ;P
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I too have been looking at the Gigabyte board; it should offer quite good performance particular for the electricity use. I contacted Gigabyte to ask about availability and they said by the end of the month.
so far I found one place in the UK offering pre-order: www. scan. co. uk for £65 + tax
in Europe, www. alternate. .co uk. have it for £75 + taxThe board I looked at before was the AsRock IMB150 with twin gigE NICS, a lot more money, from impulse.co.uk for £148 with Celeron J1900, £154 with the N2920. There's a Supermicro board too at similar pricing.
there are more baytrail-D motherboards discussed at SilentPCreview:
http://silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=66777
with some people posting results.–edit--
p.s. when I get the board I will try booting pfSense on it and report back. -
Awesome! That will be great. I am really interested in seeing how this motherboard can perform with pfSense. Especially things like max thoroughput and its performance with packages.
For me, it's either this motherboard, or a i3-4330 Haswell build-but that boards power consumption scares me.
- 13 days later
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I've not found any reasonably priced boards which take haswells and have twin NICs; although there are Celeron and Pentium Haswells with sub 20W power, they're only available embedded in things like Intel's NUC or Gigabyte BRIX, and the odd netbook.
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I was also looking at this board.
But, does anyone have an idea as to how it might compare against this: GA-C1037UN-EU
http://uk.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4747#sp
Reason I ask is that on the passmark website, this board on single thread jobs is nearly twice as fast.
So which would be a better pfsense config…?
Thanks
Chris - 19 days later
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Just picked up one of the Gigabyte 1900N-DV3 boards. I can't say I'd recommend it. The bios is ships with (F1) is complete turd. Booting from USB is almost impossible, in fact using a usb keyboard only works about 1 in 3 boots. For me, I would have to clear the cmos after it stopped working in order for it to work again. Updating the Bios to F2, is painful. You have to turn off UEFI booting completely and turn on Legacy only. This is based on the times you are able to get into the bios. about half the time on the F1 bios it would just goto a black screen and hang.
After I finally got F2 working, USB got a bit better, but that's about it. I still get random black screens trying to enter the bios. It randomly won't boot from usb devices. In addition to all this, that heatsink is hot as hell. I haven't had a chance to take the temperature yet, but too hot to touch. This is with the top of the case completely off right now, so it's venting right out of the case. I imagine I'll have to add a fan.
I couldn't get pfsense to install on this system, it would kernal panic every boot. I figured it might be related to the usb, so I installed pfsense to a hard drive on another pc, then moved it back to this. It booted, and everything was good, except it wasn't. I couldn't get DHCP on the WAN link to get an IP from the modem regardless of how I set it up. I resorted to a reboot, thinking it might fix some problems, and now I'm back at square 1 with a kernal panic on every boot. Obviously this is an issue for a different thread, so I won't go into it here, but needless to say, it's been a rough ride.
Here's a thread about the horrors of updating the bios on Gigabytes site. http://forum.giga-byte.co.uk/index.php/topic,14333.0.html
I've also seen a few other threads on freenas, and open media vault forums about weird boot issues, and stability problems. My advice, stay away at least until a new, more stable bios revision arrives.
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Hi,
i can confirm these problems with this Motherboard.
The installation of pfSense as a virtual machine on CentOS 6.5 with KVM also fails with the same problem.
The error messages are different, once ACPI, even USB.
With a USB keyboard sometimes I can not get into BIOS.
The same with USB boot (Memory Stick, external drive etc.). Sometimes it works, sometimes not.A completely immature product is sold by Gigabyte.
How about quality assurance or/and control?Does anyone have any ideas?
Thanks a lot in advance!
Cheers -
I managed to get mine working after a lot of messing with it. First thing is you have to be on the F1 bios. The F2 bios fixes a lot of USB issues, but causes a lot of other issues. In my case I had to install it on another computer and just physically move the drive over to the pfsense box. Booting from data seems a lot less buggy, but I still have reboots that are not successful and just boot to a black screen.
If you already upgraded to the F2 bios, in order to downgrade there's some magic voodoo to the power/reset buttons. I found a post on another forum that worked. Hold power button, let it turn on, then off, then back on. Then hold the reset button let it power cycle a few more times, then let go. This will then invoke the backup bios, which will still be F1 and copy it to the main bios. It took me a few tries to get this to work, so just keep trying, it'll work eventually.
After all these issues, I'm not problem free. The issue I was having earlier with not getting a dhcp address on wan is only resolved by a full reboot. No idea why a simple release and renew doesn't work. My direct console still doesn't work well. If I try and do anything but a standard boot, it just freezes. I think this may go back to the USB issues of the F1 bios. I've also heard rumors that it won't boot without a monitor attached. Haven't tried this myself yet.
The web GUI seems to be great though. Other than not being able to release and renew the dhcp on the wan connection, everything is flawless.
This is my first pfsense box, so I can't tell you much about how good it runs pfsense yet other than that it works.
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sorry to hear you guys having trouble with this board.
A bit off topic sorry,
But I thought while the topic was active I'd just say that I decided to go for the GA-C1037UN-EU board.
Which is a dual core celeron, but nearly twice as fast at single thread jobs as the GA-J1900N-D3V board (as shown on the passmark website or somewhere I was looking). Which for my application, I decided might suit better.
Anyway I can report that for me this board "GA-C1037UN-EU" works just fine. Easy install, no issues.
CPU reports 65C in a fanless case. In my rather warm house.
Chris -
@chris23
that's very interesting, thanks.the GA-J1900N-D3V has just become available in the UK from Lambdatek, and I was considering going ahead with my order (to use it to run Linux, but would have tested with pfSense) and now I'm reconsidering altogether.
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I asked my contact at Gigabyte UK if there will be any more BIOS updates to fix some of these problems, I'll update here if I hear anything.
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CPU reports 65C in a fanless case. In my rather warm house.
ChrisGood morning
When you said 65C, is it in Fahrenheit or Celsius ? thanks (i am French) -
He meant 65C. For a fanless chip in a warm room that sounds about right.
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Thanks !
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I just got this board and have it set up and booting. I get a kernel panic when trying to boot pfsense due to acpi, when I try booting with acpi disabled or in safe more it will get to "IPsec: Initialized Security Association Processing" and just hang, I'm not sure whats causing it or how to get past it. Any suggestions?
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Unfortunately this board has a highly problematic bios and may not work at all for some… Quite unlike gigabyte I would say... I would look for something from supermicro if stabilty is the main concern. Which bios are you using f1 or f2??
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Well after I got my board upgraded to F2 BIOS, I was able to install pfsense from a USB drive. It took my quite awhile to figure out how to get it to boot completely without giving me the error I posted about above or throwing an ACPI error. It seems the trick with my board is after evey boot from a power off state I have to go into BIOS and go to the options to Reset the default BIOS options and it works. Don't know why, I guess the BIOS is just buggy and immature. Other than that this board is working great. My temps hover around 38C.
- 8 days later
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a contact at Gigabyte sent me an F3 bios, no change log or anything. I haven't tested it as I've not bought the board pending these issues.
it's being discussed here:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=67563
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Good morning
There are 2 new motherboard Asrock q1900. One is itx and other is micro atx. As somebody tried these boards with pfsense ? Thanks -
@midacts
careful, the gigabyte board in the op's post only has a pci slot and you linked a pcie x4 nicI am also looking into this board for a pfsense build and I drawn to it due to its extremely low power consumption. I remember reading reviews on newegg for the asrock variants of the intel j1900 and a few users were saying to enable some boot option to support booting nix/bsd type operating systems. But for some reason all of newegg's reviews on the asrock j1900 boards are now removed??? So I took a look through asrock's manual in search for the boot option. I'm pretty sure what the newegg reviewers were saying was to disable Compability Support Module in order to boot nix/bsd OS's. Maybe the gigabyte boards have this boot option also, so if someone who already purchased one if these boards could test it out I would greatly appreciate it.
Also to those who purchased the gigabyte board, could you please post what memory you are using, more specifically the voltage that the sodimm's run at.
Thank You
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Thanks wait and see !
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Also to those who purchased the gigabyte board, could you please post what memory you are using, more specifically the voltage that the sodimm's run at.
Thank You
It requires DDR3 SODIMM's that run at 1.35v.
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That will be Celsius almost certainly.
Steve
Edit: Don't know what I did here, this post is totally out of context. ::)
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I bought this board (only found out about this thread afterwards) last Monday, together with 2 x 4GB Crucial Ballistix @ 1.35V and a 60GB Kingston (SSDNow). After having upgraded to F2 (which was indeed a bit of a pain) I got 2.2-ALPHA running without further issues. I followed the guides elsewhere on the forum and enabled CSM as well as disabling C-State. I've also enabled TRIM support by rebooting into single-user mode and running 'tunefs -t enable /'.
As mentioned, running smooth now and not seeing any issues (yet). Will keep it running for another night before replacing my old firewall though (m0n0wall on an ancient Nokia IP110), just to be sure :)
Just thought I'd share some positive news, hope this helps somebody!
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awesome dwaler! keep up posted.
I am really liking this board. I'm itching to put it in a m-350 mini-itx case with a pico psu and have a super small form factor pfsense box.
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Hey Everyone, this is my first post so I say hello!
I bought this board as soon as I figured out I wanted to build a pfsense box, without looking into all the troubles it had. I experienced so many problems trying to get it installed, I just left it alone for a week because I had lost all patience.
I tried 32 and 64 bit versions of the live usb, then live dvd, always to encounter either intermittent usb failure during install, complete lack of usb function at all, kernel panics, would get to install on hard drive, then when booted there were geometry errors. I tried many times to install windows 8.1 so I could update to bios version F2 but always failed miserably. So still on Bios F1.
I downloaded version 2.1.3 , then went into bios and set my cpu to 1 core. loaded the dvd and BOOM, it decided that it would boot and then properly install for me, much to my disbelief. I then rebooted and switched back to all 4 cpu cores and It has now been running stable for 3 days with an openvpn tunnel and zero errors!
I hope this helps some of you with all the problems you are having with this board!
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Hey Everyone, this is my first post so I say hello!
I bought this board as soon as I figured out I wanted to build a pfsense box, without looking into all the troubles it had. I experienced so many problems trying to get it installed, I just left it alone for a week because I had lost all patience.
I tried 32 and 64 bit versions of the live usb, then live dvd, always to encounter either intermittent usb failure during install, complete lack of usb function at all, kernel panics, would get to install on hard drive, then when booted there were geometry errors. I tried many times to install windows 8.1 so I could update to bios version F2 but always failed miserably. So still on Bios F1.
I downloaded version 2.1.3 , then went into bios and set my cpu to 1 core. loaded the dvd and BOOM, it decided that it would boot and then properly install for me, much to my disbelief. I then rebooted and switched back to all 4 cpu cores and It has now been running stable for 3 days with an openvpn tunnel and zero errors!
I hope this helps some of you with all the problems you are having with this board!
Where in the bios do you see the option to disable the cores? I'm on the F2 bios so not sure if that makes a difference. I am having no luck getting this board to boot 2.1.3.
- 17 days later
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I just wanted to add that I'm running the GA-C1037UN-EU board earlier mentioned in this thread.
I'm running it with an additional NIC in the PCI port, so have three NICs all in all. I also use vlans and everything is working great.
I run it of an SSD and everything is very low temperature. I have a slow running 120mm case fan but I think it is not needed.
It's been running it 24/7 since last year, so about 6-7 months now. Highly recommended. ;D ;D ;D
The only drawback is that it's PCI and not PCIe if you want to add a dual or quad network card. A regular pci slot can handle one gigabit without trouble. But perhaps it's academic anyway since there are usually data bottlenecks elsewhere in the chipset and the cpu.
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First post, so… hello :D
This mb work well with the last release of pfsense? And what about the realtek lan?
Thanks for the help -
Does it work better with Bios F3 version?
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Looks like it should be:
@http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=585025&sid=956a29819e12154d85832fd26f45d365#p585025:I have to say that the F3C BIOS seems quite stable, it provides a lot of previously missing options (working PXE legacy boot, USB support, advanced options)
Steve
- 22 days later
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did pfsense support the onboard nic.
gigabyte website did not state the model of the nic chip. (i think it may be 8111G??? not sure :'() -
@pete.s.:
I just wanted to add that I'm running the GA-C1037UN-EU board earlier mentioned in this thread.
I'm running it with an additional NIC in the PCI port, so have three NICs all in all. I also use vlans and everything is working great.
I run it of an SSD and everything is very low temperature. I have a slow running 120mm case fan but I think it is not needed.
It's been running it 24/7 since last year, so about 6-7 months now. Highly recommended. ;D ;D ;D
The only drawback is that it's PCI and not PCIe if you want to add a dual or quad network card. A regular pci slot can handle one gigabit without trouble. But perhaps it's academic anyway since there are usually data bottlenecks elsewhere in the chipset and the cpu.
I've bought the GA-C1037UN-EU under the impression that it would be no problem, but now the NIC's don't get an IP from the DHCP server. Do I have to copy the if_re.ko from topics in this forum (see https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=65355.30) ?
uname0u gives FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE-p16
How did you install this c1037un board?
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If you've assigned the interface as type DHCP then it is appearing correctly, the driver is not the problem.
What have you done so far?Steve
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If you've assigned the interface as type DHCP then it is appearing correctly, the driver is not the problem.
What have you done so far?Steve
I've installed pfSense, assigned the re0 to the WAN interface (DHCP) an plugged in the cable modem (after properly powercycling it). Alas…no IP. Then I've connected the WAN to my old pfSense LAN and I can see in the old pfSense log that it is indeed giving out a DHCP ip, but all the c1037un does is sending more requests for an IP.
Then I've changed the etc.conf with the following :synchronous_dhclient="YES". Still no IP...
Then I've loaded the if_re.ko from various posts in this forum (https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=65355.45) to /boot/kernel and /boot/modules. Also added if_re_load="YES" to /boot/loader.conf.local.
Still no IP :-X
From what I gather Realtek changes it hardware sometimes without changing the model number, thus it might work for one person but not for the next >:(
I'm at a loss now, with the Ubuntu live CD the nics work flawlessly and get an IP. Maybe I have to virtualize pfSense just to get it working?
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Hmm, well that's odd behaviour. You could well be right, Realtek do like to change hardware.
What does pciconf list the NIC as? The PCI revision usually indicates what the NIC type is.Steve
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Hmm, well that's odd behaviour. You could well be right, Realtek do like to change hardware.
What does pciconf list the NIC as? The PCI revision usually indicates what the NIC type is.Steve
Due to the problems with the nic on bare-metal pfSense I've decided to use esxi and run pfSense on top of that. As it turns out this is something I should've done right from the beginning, it works perfect.
- 14 days later
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Any new information regarding this board? Does the NIC's works out of the box?
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Which board? There are two being discussed here.
Steve