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    Pfsense + D2500CC Atom Status Quo

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    • P
      PfMySense
      last edited by

      Hi there,

      i am looking for a new motherboard to build a tiny and energy efficient pfsense machine like many of u already did.
      As i was looking for informations i stumbled across the Intel D2500CC which seems pretty capable of doing the job :)

      Atom boards with 2x Intel LAN are very rare so i checked a few threads on the forum here and people were having some strange issues with this board
      probably related to the embedded graphics (PowerVR SGX545).

      Is there anyone in here who can give me an update on these issues. Maybe some of them are already gone due to bios updates for example.
      Some people here reported that the system gets rather hot if build inside a SFF case.

      Did someone experiment with pfsense 2.1 on this particular motherboard and can tell something about that?
      I appreciate any information you can give me.

      Thank you

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      • D
        daniev
        last edited by

        Been running on this mb for about a week, no issues. Install was problem free.

        Edit: Sorry, I lied. I'm running on the D2500CCE.

        http://www.mini-box.com/Intel-D2500CCE-Mini-ITX-Motherboard

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        • S
          sabersaw
          last edited by

          @daniev:

          Been running on this mb for about a week, no issues. Install was problem free.

          Edit: Sorry, I lied. I'm running on the D2500CCE.

          http://www.mini-box.com/Intel-D2500CCE-Mini-ITX-Motherboard

          I just ordered one of these boards.  Wondering what type of storage device you are using?  I plan on using a standard SATA 2.5 drive. Have read FreeBSD doesn't like all modern SATA controller/drive combos.

          #edit# One more question for you… are you using a 32 bit or 64 bit version of PFsense?

          Don't mean to hijack your thread PfMySense... Hopefully these questions are pertinent to you as well ;-)

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          • D
            daniev
            last edited by

            @sabersaw:

            Wondering what type of storage device you are using?

            Standard 2.5" Sata Seagate drive. This was the 2nd install of pFSense 2.0.1 on the drive and it did not like it at first. So I reformatted the drive and after that it was smooth sailing.

            @sabersaw:

            One more question for you… are you using a 32 bit or 64 bit version of PFsense?

            32 bit. I have a 2Gig memory stick in it.

            I'm not a power user by any stretch of the imagination. I consider myself a semi-advanced home user. I have the Verizon FIOS 35/35 plan at home but I see 43 mbs down and 39 mbs up (this is not unusual with FIOS) both prior to the pfSense router and with the pfSense router. I also have SIP devices, STBs and  DVR with occasional Video on Demand via IP, SlingBox for my daughter away at College, a smattering of laptops and desktops with smart phones and e-readers. All work great, I'm especially pleased with the SIP quality as both me and my wife work from home and phone quality is important.

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            • S
              sabersaw
              last edited by

              Thanks for information daniev!  I'm jealous of you FIOS subscribers.

              The new router/pc hardware will be here Monday.  I'll report back after build and pfSense install.  You're using more bandwidth than I could ever imagine getting in my area, and our builds will be identical. I'll be using a fresh from RMA Western Dig 2.5 SATA.

              Thanks again for info.. I'm pretty confident in the mb board decision now.

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              • S
                sabersaw
                last edited by

                Install went fairly smooth.  The USB to IDE adapter I used looked like it caused the install to hose up.  Dug out a SATA optical drive for install and everything went seamless after that.

                I disabled audio, serial, and parallel controllers.  Also note…. a BIOS upgrade came out last month.  I applied this before installing.  Would be nice to have serial (then I could kill video) but the small case I got doesn't have space for a db9 header.  Probably doesn't effect performance too much.  But would free up some system RAM.

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                • F
                  fthomasr
                  last edited by

                  @sabersaw:

                  Would be nice to have serial (then I could kill video) but the small case I got doesn't have space for a db9 header.

                  Add a db9 header? Huh? Doesn't the motherboard back panel have TWO serial ports already? You can't use one of those?

                  Also you didn't have any weird video issues as others report with this board?

                  Thanks

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                  • M
                    MMacD
                    last edited by

                    Apropos the lack of fBSD support for Intel's video chip on this board, has anyone tried sticking a supported video card into the pcie slot?  Bypass the onboard video altogether?

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                    • T
                      t3h0th3r
                      last edited by

                      @MMacD:

                      Apropos the lack of fBSD support for Intel's video chip on this board, has anyone tried sticking a supported video card into the pcie slot?  Bypass the onboard video altogether?

                      You can do that, but mind you, the slot is PCI not PCIe. Using a PCI graphics card, you don't get any video problems at all.

                      Concerning the missing support, there's a commit from 2 days ago, which should fix the problem. Hopefully the fix gets back ported into the upcoming 2.1 release.

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                      • M
                        MMacD
                        last edited by

                        Ooops, nice catch.  Somehow I only saw the mini-pcie slot in the specs.  My face is red.

                        But having a pci slot is even better, since there aren't all that many mini-pcie video cards that I've been able to find.

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                        • F
                          frater
                          last edited by

                          I have all the symptoms of VLANs not working.
                          My working XML-file for another system is not working on this motherboard.
                          I can ping it on the 2 parent interfaces (em0 and em1), but not on their vlans.
                          The vlans are created without any error messages and appear when I do an ifconfig.

                          Is anyone using VLANs on this motherboard?????

                          I even tried 2.1 instead of 2.01 and it behaves the same

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                          • F
                            frater
                            last edited by

                            I just noticed that I can ping the pfsense router on its vlanned IP during startup.
                            Just before it comes with its menu it stops responding.

                            I will try to make a very basic setup and see where it will bring me.

                            I also saw the error message in the log that the driver doesn't have support for Altq.
                            As far as I can gather this shouldn't be a show-stopper.

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                            • A
                              Avgur
                              last edited by

                              my vpn works fine on this motherboard pfsense 2.1

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                              • F
                                frater
                                last edited by

                                @Avgur:

                                my vpn works fine on this motherboard pfsense 2.1

                                Was this a reply to my post?

                                If so… I have a problem with VLANs, which is completely different.

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                                • W
                                  wallabybob
                                  last edited by

                                  @frater:

                                  I just noticed that I can ping the pfsense router on its vlanned IP during startup.
                                  Just before it comes with its menu it stops responding.

                                  MAYBE it stops responding when the firewall rules are loaded. What is in the firewall log? (See Status -> System Logs, click on Firewall tab).

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                                  • F
                                    frater
                                    last edited by

                                    I was able to ping the device after I turned off Vlan hwtagging using ifconfig with the command:

                                    ifconfig em0 -vlanhwtag
ifconfig em1 -vlanhwtag

                                    This is not a configurable option in the webIF
                                    I will now investigate the most elegant way to implement it.

                                    Can anyone help??????

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                                    • F
                                      frater
                                      last edited by

                                      Using the webIF (and therefore inside config.xml) I added these 2 cronjob entries

                                      *       *       *       *       *       root    ifconfig em0 | grep -q VLAN_HWTAG && ifconfig em0 -vlanhwtag
*       *       *       *       *       root    ifconfig em1 | grep -q VLAN_HWTAG && ifconfig em1 -vlanhwtag

                                      The D2500CC has now replaced the Celeron system I had.

                                      It seems that the 2 Intel NICs are reporting hardware tagging to the system without actually having this capability in the driver.
                                      I do have 35 vlans on my LAN-NIC and 5 vlans on my WAN-NIC

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                                      • E
                                        Eurisko
                                        last edited by

                                        @frater:

                                        I just noticed that I can ping the pfsense router on its vlanned IP during startup.
                                        Just before it comes with its menu it stops responding.

                                        Any chance you enabled the Serial Console option? Enabling Serial Console output will also cause that behavior on that board currently.

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