ECS KBN-I/2100 AMD APU E1-2100 ITX board
-
I too am using the ECS KBN-I/2100 for PfSense as I said in my first post. Same issue with the onboard NIC but since I am using the Intel Pro MT1000 dual NIC PCIe card it's not too big of a deal. If I need additional networks I will just VLAN it on the LAN network since my switch is smart capable.
It's interesting that you got it to work using KVM setup. Pretty cool idea actually.
The nice thing about this board it'll accept Mini PCIe cards so I've seen Intel cards that will fit in that slot. So that would be another way to get additional NICs.
-
How is this board working out for everyone?
I probably should have asked before I pulled the trigger on it :o Then again 35 bucks after rebate, worth a roll of the dice. I'm still gathering parts, so far I got the board, 1 stick of 8g ram, HP NC360T dual nic, and a pico psu. I guess I need a hdd or SSD, any suggestions on size or type- laptop or standard size? I don't know what this little board can do, hopefully snort and maybe proxy? I have 3 users with a WAN speed of 50/down 25/up . I never used PFsense before so this should be interesting.
Thanks for any insights.
-
How is this board working out for everyone?
I probably should have asked before I pulled the trigger on it :o Then again 35 bucks after rebate, worth a roll of the dice. I'm still gathering parts, so far I got the board, 1 stick of 8g ram, HP NC360T dual nic, and a pico psu. I guess I need a hdd or SSD, any suggestions on size or type- laptop or standard size? I don't know what this little board can do, hopefully snort and maybe proxy? I have 3 users with a WAN speed of 50/down 25/up . I never used PFsense before so this should be interesting.
Thanks for any insights.
I have a very similar setup as yours. I used a 500 gig laptop hard drive for couple of reasons. Low power and not too much heat. Granted 500 gigs is way overkill for a firewall but price difference between 250 gigs and 500 gigs is like $10 more so figured what the hell. Only paid less than $50 for it. SSD are great drives but I am a little old school with certain things so you have to decide on that. You really can't go wrong either way. My old 80 gig laptop hard drive died on me after it's been running 24/7 for 4 years straight. Not too shabby for a non-enterprise class.
-
Thanks for the info, I just ordered a 2.5" WD black 360GB from amazon.
I can't wait to play and learn!
-
It didn't recognize the onboard NIC at all during install. At the time I was having heck of a time to get it to be stable so I turned off alot of devices to see what is causing it. At the end it was the power management feature that was messing it up. Cool and Quiet works fine. PowerD feature in PfSense works fine which correctly controls the clock speed of the processors. Whatever reason the thermal sensors does not work in PfSense so may have to see if I can find a package that will.
When I get a chance I will re-enable it and see if it sees it or not. It's headless at the moment so have to hook up the monitor and keyboard to it so I can get into the BIOS. Need to anyway to check on something.
Also, this board supports secure boot. It's one of those new BIOS that uses UEFI. Fortunately FreeBSD 8.3 didn't have a problem with it. Disabled or not it had no effect on booting.
I took a risk using bleeding edge stuff that may run into problems with FreeBSD 8.3. Other than that one glitch it's been working fine. I will let you know about the onboard NIC and power draw.
Hello, Darkk
My pfsense box is using same board as you….but it is very unstable. every time the box is rebooting itself.
I re-enabled every thing but i dont know what was wrong.
my box is...
ECS e1-2100 with (corsair 2gb ddr 3 1333) x 2
NIC : Intel 2 port gigabit Pci-E (from ebay)
160gb wd hdd sata2
Disable .. NIC, Sound...whatever i don't need
Default : ACPI Power and CPU Setting...and 2.1 pfsense amd64 version
please let me know your setting in bios & pfsense...
thank you in advance
-
Default : ACPI Power and CPU Setting…
Disable ACPI. I'm pretty sure I disabled mine before I had all the components for my build. Either in the first post or several down he mentions disabling it.
There is also a driver available for the onboard LAN. I had some trouble figuring out how to get it on the box. I used winSCP, use root for login and your password, using admin for login will give you an error. Thanks poster for the driver! Works great!
-
Disable ACPI. Also, after a month that's been running it started doing random reboots. Saw strange characters on the screen. Turns out the 2gig RAM DDR3 sticks were older design with higher voltage than the motherboard could supply. So had to order one 8gig RAM stick from Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008TCPVC8/ref=oh_details_o06_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
If you are going with single stick it needs to be in DIMM slot 2. Ever since I replaced the RAM it's been stable.
Also, don't enable any power saving features in PfSense such as PowerD. There is no real benefit with the current software. Besides, the power draw is very low anyway.
Hope this helps.
-
Anyone still running this board? I built a pfSense box with this board and I am having reboots every 10 hours or so. RAM is on the certified list, I disabled PowerD, How are you guys able to disable ACPI, if I do that via hint.acpi.0.disabled="1" in loader.conf.local then I get a kernel panic and it don't boot at all.
-
Hi chrispeden, I have just grabbed my self one of these guys and have about the same problem. I have tried swapping out just about everything, ram hdd, nic, cables, and adding fans to the case with no luck. Mine reboots about every hour give or take with no error message. The thing I have seen is high cpu usage which is odd since i moved from a athlon x2 which when just doing normal routing would peak at 10% this guy will max out the cpu. Have you resolved your problem yet?
-
Zero, yeah I think I got mine resolved. I am using a dell/intel quad port gigabit adapter, it uses the IGB driver. after I turned off MSI-X interrupts it hasn't rebooted since.
I hope this helps, if you have any questions feel free to ask.
-
I just built one box with this board. I am running pfsense inside ESXi, though. It is ok for what I use it for now, since I have very slow internet connection (10M/3M). The CPU usage is almost always above 80% under load, even though all I am running is just OpenVPN and squid. For the OpenVPN I am using AES-256-CBC algorithm and I did turn on AES-NI. However, I did not notice any performance improvement with the AES-NI turned on.
I do get full speed with my relatively slow connection but I am already pushing the limit of this board. All in all, I would not recommend this board since N3150 and etc can be had for not much more money.
-
Zero, yeah I think I got mine resolved. I am using a dell/intel quad port gigabit adapter, it uses the IGB driver. after I turned off MSI-X interrupts it hasn't rebooted since.
I hope this helps, if you have any questions feel free to ask.
How were you able to turn off MSI-X?
-
Please Check the Docs –> https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Tuning_and_Troubleshooting_Network_Cards#MSI.2FMSIX
