Question about motherboard compatibility
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@stephenw10 Thanks again for your input.
I thought to try new null-modem cables and thought that was a reasonable suggestion, so i ordered a few... took 2 weeks with, well, how things are right now. Tried them out and no difference.
I went digging back on the special cable to go from mobo header to db-9 interface... the mobo manual tell you where pin 1 is, and names the pins, but doesn't tell you how to count them. I thought I had the correct cable, that did some swapping of pins, but on further investigation, I was wrong. So I purchased a new 10-pin mobo header->9 pin db-9 cable (which took 3 weeks to get here, again, just saying why it has taken so long for me to report back). This new cable is "straight-thru", so pin1 on 10-pin mobo goes to pin1 of db-9, pin2 on 10-pin mobo goes to pin2 of db-9, etc... so i poped that in, connected things back up, started up putty, and booted my computer, and right away things were correct
I honestly thought it was some mis-configuration of speed or parity or stopbit, but nope, just the cable
And on the no-keyboard+no-monitor front, i was able to boot headless, no monitor or keyboard or mouse. I am used to dealing with previous mobos where there was a specific entry in bios to adjust... i think
it was called something like "Halt on", and you'd have a dropdown list to choose from with things like, "all", "no keyboard", "all errors", "hd error"... something like that, but no such animal 
in this particular mobo's bios.
So I've put my DIY-firewall into production at home (sounds pretty fancy at least
), and aside from a few challenges it's working great so far.
CPU sits usually at between 0% and 1%, sometimes briefly at 2%, with the cpu throttled back to 3GHz still. And that includes doing activities where it would peg the old firewall's CPU at 60%!! My i3 is also running much cooler at 27C vs 67C!
Got suricata running after it refused to start... i hit the internet and found others that had similar issues, and upped the streams and flow memory caps and it worked. I have 4 instances running, one on each physical interface (I would have had 5 but still, ahem, waiting for pfsense 2.5, which looks like it's coming soon (for real
).
Got pfBlockerNG-devel up a few hours ago... fought with it a bit but think it's good for now. might have to revisit which feeds I use.So anyway, appreciate everyone's help. I appreciate the good person who had posted up (elsewhere) about that particular suricata issue i ran into, with a detailed solution walkthru and photos! So I wanted to give back a little and just update on my DYI project, and hopefully some small tidbit i went thru helps somebody else out
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