Host AP on embedded pfSense
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Hi guys,
I have a friend that recently tried to run pfSense in Host AP mode on his WRAP 1E-1.
But unfortunately he told me that his box would go nuts after 24 hours, with slow webGUI response and with veeery low network speeds and that he would then need to reboot it.
I know that I have read more than once words from the devs saying that for a reliable solution one should buy a real Access Point device.
I know that Linux users claim that Host AP is fast and reliable in that OS so I thought it was something to do with *BSD…
But a few days ago that same friend of mine called me saying that he has been trying these OpenBSD images.
And he told me that running a similar config on these OpenBSD image (compared to the pfSense config) his WRAP has been running stable, reliable and with fast network speeds for 30 days.
Now this guy loves speed and if he says it's fast is because it's fast and this guy hates unreliable software and if he says it's reliable it's because it's reliable.
Now, a few questions based on the above story:- do you think pfSense can act as an Host AP without issues?
- do you think pfSense running on Host AP mode will be slow?
- do you think it's better to buy an Access Point? Why?
All this because it would appear obvious to me that the problems are either pfSense/m0n0wall related or are FreeBSD related but most surely not *BSD related and since I'm planning on buying a miniPCI Winstron CM9…
TIA
Cheers
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I'm using wireless with 3 wraps. I get about 15-20 mbit/s with the wifilink and it is stable. One of my wraps with cm9 in the office had an uptime of 34 days before I upgraded. During this period nothing was changed with the config or restarted. I as well have one at home which usually has an uptime of about 2-3 days before I reflash with a new version. I know someone who has a wrap with cm9 running sharing his internetconnection with his neighbour this way and they even do filesharing. I can't confirm what you see. I'm running wireless since the 0.6x versions.
What version are you refering to btw? Anything in the systemlogs when the problems appear? Does saving wireless settings bring it back to normal speed??
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Hi guys,
I have a friend that recently tried to run pfSense in Host AP mode on his WRAP 1E-1.
But unfortunately he told me that his box would go nuts after 24 hours, with slow webGUI response and with veeery low network speeds and that he would then need to reboot it.Hi rds_correia and hoba,
About the quoted comment, that would be me :D
It seems the problem was related to a bad flash card >:(
I'll have to install pfSense again, because we're currently running "flashdist", which is OpenBSD based, and it's been up for a very long time without any issues. No plans to change it, at least for a while.
I do recall that once I had m0n0wall running as a wireless AP, and the time for client association took much longer than what it currently takes in flashdist (which I compiled myself a new version of OpenBSD (3.8 ) using this as reference: http://www.nmedia.net/~chris/soekris/install.html )
So maybe there's something in the networking code in OpenBSD and even NetBSD which is still not so optimized in FreeBSD?
As far as I'm concerned, and for all tests I've done, FreeBSD is the fastest of the three BSDs running applications, but the newer networking code, specially on NetBSD, is faster than FreeBSD. And as most drivers on OpenBSD are derived from NetBSD, maybe that's why our AP is faster and performs better when associating wireless clients, etc.
Anyway, thanks to everyone here for making pfSense, and for choosing a *BSD for the job. We use all three at work ;)
I'll now keep a closer eye on this forum, thanks to rds_correia :)-Karl
http://www.kvcd.net
Advanced Video Conversion -
Hya Karl :D,
Thanks for clarifying this for us ;).
Oh I almost forgot: welcome to the forum ;D
Cheers