Intel® Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260
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Hi folks,
I was unable to find a good answer for my question so I am feeling free to open a new topic and (hopefully) help others with this in the future.
I am currently running pfSense on an old firewall appliance (from eBay) but it consumes 135watts of power and the 1.5Ghz mobile CPU seems sometimes not fast enough to process Snort, LoadBalancing, 2xWAN (cable 150/10 & vdsl 40/4), QoS and BIND.Intel DN2800MT with 12v mITX case
2x 2GB memory
Samsung 32GB mSATA
Intel
PRO/1000 PT Quad PortThe only thing I cannot figure out is if pfSense will support the new Intel Dual Band Wireless-N 7260 Plus miniPCIe card as this would be a great replacement for my current AP.
For short: anyone experience with this wlan card or any comments on my choice of hardware?
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No, that card likely won't work for years.
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I cannot believe that an appliance with a 1.5GHz laptop CPU consumes anywhere near 135W. It may have that value written on the back but if you actually measure it I would put money on it being closer to 35W.
I can believe that it's not up to running Snort on a combined 190Mbps WAN.
What hardware is it?The D2800 may also fall short here.
Steve
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You are absolutely correct as I measured the power consumption the incorrect way (before UPS instead of behind). It also measures my 7W LED bulb as 22W so some tool got itself an one way ticket to the chemical bin.
The appliance is a Checkpoint UTM 570 and the power supply is only capable of providing 65W (max power consumption in the specs is 40W). As both HDD and memory were defective I replaced it with a CF card and other memory and now it is doing 30W. It should be possible to push 2.5Gb/s for firewalling and 1.7Gb/s for IPS but maybe there is some kind of ASIC on board for that (not able to find that kind of information yet).
Yesterday I have build the D2800 box and it is running smoothly.
I will try to add the other services coming weekend to see how it performs (and otherwise one of my colleagues will buy it from me). I will forget about the wireless card and just buy some 802.11AC access point. -
This post is deleted! -
Hey Guys,
Sorry to bump this up but it's been over a year and a half now and I'm looking at one of these cards to replace the WLE200NX card that was DOA inside a recently ordered SG-2440.
I'd ask for a replacement from the guys at pfSense but because I'm in Aus buying a new Wifi card is literally cheaper then shipping.
So as of July 2015 is this card now supported?
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Still no 802.11AC support in FreeBSD AFAIK.
Are you sure the WLE200NX is dead? What are the symptoms that make you think that? I don't think I've ever seen a dead one.
Steve
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So as of July 2015 is this card now supported?
- AC support No!
- WLE200NX Yes!
Try open another thread, your own, and then let us have a look over.
Perhaps during the long journey the pre assembled card was slightly slipped a bit out of the miniPCIe slot.
Try to fit the card once more again in and restart then. Please contact before doing so a piece of metal.And if this will be failing, you can surely better go with each Buffalo or Netgear home router with flashed
OpenWRT oder DD-WRT for something around $20 - $100. -
@BlueKobold:
Perhaps during the long journey the pre assembled card was slightly slipped a bit out of the miniPCIe slot.
The WLE200NX card was detected, I could pickup other SSID's on the card and connect to them but when broadcasting a SSID from the pfSense box it just would not work regardless of what I tried….
That is until I swapped the card to a different PCIe slot which it then started to work perfectly.
Faulty slot maybe? If the card was not seated correctly I don't think I would see that behavior it would be more likely the card just wouldn't function at all.@BlueKobold:
OpenWRT oder DD-WRT for something around $20 - $100.
Using iptables over pf?
I'll pass on that thanks, I use DD-WRT at home on a ASUS AC-68U and can't stand it when compared to pfsense.So my understanding is the intel 7260 card will work just not with AC functionality?
You would just be limited to A/B/G/N?Edit: Quote tags
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I think the suggestion there was to use an external access point running *wrt rather than use a PCIe card in pfSense. Not replace pfSense. That makes a lot of sense in many scenarios.
There is no 802.11AC support in FreeBSD (and hence pfSense) at all but additionally there is limited wireless support in general. The Atheros chipsets are better supported than most but even there I'm not sure there are any drivers for the AC chips, in any mode.
There doesn't appear to be a driver for the Intel 7260 at all as yet. I might exepct it to be supported by the iwn(4) driver but no 7XXX cards are listed:
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sys/dev/iwn/if_iwn.c?revision=285234&view=markup
That's even in head.Additionally the iwn driver does not support access point mode: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=iwn
Steve
Edit: Looks like it may eventually be supported as iwa(4) but no working driver exists yet:
https://github.com/erikarn/freebsd-iwa/blob/master/src/sys/dev/iwa/if_iwa.cA direct port of the iwm driver from OpenBSD seems to exist here, no idea of it's status:
https://github.com/rpaulo/iwm -
Using iptables over pf?
I'll pass on that thanks, I use DD-WRT at home on a ASUS AC-68U and can't stand it when compared to pfsense.It was more in the meaning, to get a cheap WLAN AP with DD-WRT, but working and perhaps
comes by side with ac support. And nothing compared against each other. -
run win2012 server with pfsense in hyper-v. you can use the intel card as a AP through win server.
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run win2012 server with pfsense in hyper-v. you can use the intel card as a AP through win server.
I have tried that with Win2016, but pfsense does not recognize the Card as a WLAN device. For him it is an HNx not ATx.
Any Ideas?
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Are you sure the AC7260 supports hostapd mode? Not working for me in Windows 10.
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My i7 haswell laptop consume 20w or so while idling and +100w while gaming with a dedicated nvidia card. Maybe it is 35w of power usage?
Anyway, it is a sort of problematic card for some users, no ac card is supported and even n cards doesn't work at the rated speed on BSD. Use a dedicated AP. -
Are you sure the AC7260 supports hostapd mode? Not working for me in Windows 10.
You are right. I am using Dual Band Wireless-AC 8260 and Hosted network supported is "No".
Do you know a PCIe Card with AC Support and Hosted network Support? I don't want to use a AP.
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For use in the host OS I assume. You realise there are no 802.11AC cards that will work in pfSense?
Steve
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For use in the host OS I assume. You realise there are no 802.11AC cards that will work in pfSense?
Steve
Hi Steve,
yes firstly I will use it in Server 2016. So do anyone know a AC PCIe card which is able to host an AP?
Regards
