Motherboard ideas
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I can't help you with your nvidia nics but my impression is that you should use intel nics for a stable environment to have less trouble.
And in my opinion it would be better to work with vlans instead of using so many nics for your internal lans. To do so, your switches must also have vlan support, of cource.
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I have not heard good things about Nvidia chipset NICs and FreeBSD. Asus generally uses Broadcom on their server class motherboards, I think Broadcom NICs would be preferable to the Nvidia ones. I was considering an ASUS board myself, but couldn't find a small form factor board with Intel nics… Also, consider alternatives to using a PCI or PCIe slot for everything. For example, the Tyan board I was talking about earlier only has 1 PCI and 1 PCIe slot, but I could do everything you described using the 3 onboard NICs, an add-in PCI and PCIe nic, the onboard firewire for CARP, and a mini-pci wireless card. For WANs, you could use a cheap dual-port fxp card in one PCI slot, and for faster interfaces, a dual-port PCIe Intel card. So you might be able to do this without needing five PCIe slots.
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@dotdash: I ordered all componentes except for the heatsink. Please tell me what heatsink you used in yout 1U case.
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It was a Dynatron I31 active cooler. They also have a passive heat sink I51 that fits.
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… the onboard firewire for CARP...
can you use firewire for CARP?
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ethernet over firewire doesn't seem to work with pfSense. the fwe driver has been taken out of the kernel some months ago
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I got CARP running over firewire using fwip, not fwe (which seems to be non-standard).
I have some notes here:
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,3604.0.html
