PfSense with Gigabyte GA-J1900N-D3V

BobbyB

I have been using the GA-J1900N-D3V with pfSense for about a month. This is my first router build and I did not have any problems other than a memory stick which was not compatible and caused the system to fail to boot. (I ended up using a memory stick out of a laptop; the new memory stick worked fine in the laptop.) I am using an Intel Dual NIC since I had read a lot of problems with Realtek NICs. I purchased the Intel PWLA8492MT PRO/1000 MT PCI/PCI-X Dual Port Server Adapter:

http://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00006HX1V

I am getting 150Mbps down and 12Mbps up and my CPU utilization goes to about 30%. The rest of the time CPU utilization sits between 0% and 3%.

This is a home router, so I am not running any VPNs. I have Snort installed, but I am still trying to figure it out.

I can't speak for enterprise use, but as a home router, this thing is awesome.

For WiFi I installed an Ubiquiti Networks UAP-AC-LR-US 802.11ac Long Range Access Point. I mounted it on the ceiling in the center of our 2200 sq ft single story house and get awesome wireless coverage throughout.

I was actually thinking about doing something like that, tossing in the PCI card. I may have to revisit things, but I'm almost positive that this board is bad. I went ahead and ordered some 1.35 volt ram, just to see if mine was flakey. Good to hear that you are happy with it. I really want to like this board, so I might have to give it another change. I just want to make sure that this thing will be able to handle the need speed that I will be getting here by the end of the year. 300Mbps down and 50Mbps up.

I too use Ubiquity AP's they are amazing!

Thanks for the reply. Always good to read about a success story!

RussellB

@BobbyB:

I was actually thinking about doing something like that, tossing in the PCI card. I may have to revisit things, but I'm almost positive that this board is bad. I went ahead and ordered some 1.35 volt ram, just to see if mine was flakey. Good to hear that you are happy with it. I really want to like this board, so I might have to give it another change. I just want to make sure that this thing will be able to handle the need speed that I will be getting here by the end of the year. 300Mbps down and 50Mbps up.

I too use Ubiquity AP's they are amazing!

Thanks for the reply. Always good to read about a success story!

If you have ruled out all the other possible culprits: loose connections, memory, and power supply; then the only thing left is the motherboard. Amazon is so good about returns, you could have a new board in a day or two.

BobbyB

@RussellB:

@BobbyB:

I was actually thinking about doing something like that, tossing in the PCI card. I may have to revisit things, but I'm almost positive that this board is bad. I went ahead and ordered some 1.35 volt ram, just to see if mine was flakey. Good to hear that you are happy with it. I really want to like this board, so I might have to give it another change. I just want to make sure that this thing will be able to handle the need speed that I will be getting here by the end of the year. 300Mbps down and 50Mbps up.

I too use Ubiquity AP's they are amazing!

Thanks for the reply. Always good to read about a success story!

If you have ruled out all the other possible culprits: loose connections, memory, and power supply; then the only thing left is the motherboard. Amazon is so good about returns, you could have a new board in a day or two.

Right on, yeah, I ordered some 1.35 DDR3, so that should be here this week. I'll give that a go before I send it back. I sort of think that maybe one of these old modules is flakey, so we'll see what the new ram does. If it works, I'll keep the board for sure, esp. if guys like you have had success with 2.3!

BobbyB

This Intel Atom board from Amazon looks pretty good, and has Intel NICs, I wonder if anyone is running 2.3 with this?

http://www.amazon.com/Intel-D2500CCE-Mini-ITX-Motherboard-BLKD2500CCE/dp/B006ICQ3FK/ref=pd_sim_147_3?ie=UTF8&dpID=51mMt8cv6CL&dpSrc=sims&preST=AC_UL160_SR160%2C160&refRID=1R4J9EH37W9168QM59YW

Would the Atom have enough power?

BobbyB

So it looks like the NEW 2x4GB LPDDR3 helped. System seems a LOT more stable. Maybe that was the issue all along, goofy ram. I'm going to run this thing through-out the night to see what it looks like in the AM. I'll keep people posted that may be interested. Thanks!

@BobbyB:

This Intel Atom board from Amazon looks pretty good, and has Intel NICs, I wonder if anyone is running 2.3 with this?

http://www.amazon.com/Intel-D2500CCE-Mini-ITX-Motherboard-BLKD2500CCE/dp/B006ICQ3FK/ref=pd_sim_147_3?ie=UTF8&dpID=51mMt8cv6CL&dpSrc=sims&preST=AC_UL160_SR160%2C160&refRID=1R4J9EH37W9168QM59YW

Would the Atom have enough power?

Your board & an Intel Quad Port NIC for ~$50 on top might be ending up with ~$170, if I will be in that situation
I would more love to go with this one and all is on board likes N2930 CPU that is the follower of the J1900 and
4 x Intel i211AT NICs, 2 x miniPCIe + SIM, fan less and for only ~$29 on top of yours. Jetway N2930

BobbyB

@BlueKobold:

@BobbyB:

This Intel Atom board from Amazon looks pretty good, and has Intel NICs, I wonder if anyone is running 2.3 with this?

http://www.amazon.com/Intel-D2500CCE-Mini-ITX-Motherboard-BLKD2500CCE/dp/B006ICQ3FK/ref=pd_sim_147_3?ie=UTF8&dpID=51mMt8cv6CL&dpSrc=sims&preST=AC_UL160_SR160%2C160&refRID=1R4J9EH37W9168QM59YW

Would the Atom have enough power?

Your board & an Intel Quad Port NIC for ~$50 on top might be ending up with ~$170, if I will be in that situation
I would more love to go with this one and all is on board likes N2930 CPU that is the follower of the J1900 and
4 x Intel i211AT NICs, 2 x miniPCIe + SIM, fan less and for only ~$29 on top of yours. Jetway N2930

I hear ya! So far the J1900 has been up for over 3hrs and seems to be okay, I'm starting to think that the only thing wrong with it was RAM. I used some old DDR3 that I had lying around. For giggles, I might pop in a different hard drive and see if I can get Windows 7 to install, but I think things are good with the board. I am going to burn it in more and then get a case for it soon. I'll keep on updating so that others might find this helpful. I really do believe that the Celeron will over better performance than the Atom. While I'm not thrilled with a RealTek NIC, I know that for my home environment it'll be decent enough. If all else fails I can go the other route like you stated and find a decent dual or quad nic Intel card.

BobbyB

So I just wanted to update everyone on my progress. The new 1.35volt LPDDR3 Ram did the trick, this board has been rock solid ever since I installed it. I've done multiple tests and everything seems to be good to go. Very impressive speed and the web gui looks and performs fantastic! I'll keep working with this board and post back in a few days after I get my new system built around it. Thanks for all the help that others have given me!

edwardwong

Have you tried iperf to test the limit? I heard from other forum that the Realtek chip behaves badly when pushing it to 1G limit.

fostytou

@tw_wff:

@wolfpackunr:

Could someone give step by step instructions on what they did to update the BIOS or even get into it. I'm pretty sure my board came with F1. Every time it boots it goes to the EFI Shell menu.

Things I've tried:

-Clearing CMOS and Reboot, same
-Formatting a USB as FreeDOS with the BIOS files, same
-USB Drive with Windows 8 GPT, same
-USB keyboard attached to PS/2 converter, same
-Pressing Delete as fast as possible on bootup, same

Everything I've come across to try does nothing, still goes to the EFI Shell Version 2.31 screen with yellow text. I can type exit and then it will say insert media and reboot but that is all it will do. Rebooting goes back to the same screen. Did anyone else encounter and find a way around or should I just RMA it?

@wolfpackunr I had the same problem, however I finally managed to enter BIOS with a PS/2 keyboard attached instead of a USB one. But even if I remove the EFI shell from the boot priority list, the board still boots into the shell. The only option so far was to disable UEFI support entirely and switch to legacy mode, then it skips the EFI shell and boots normally. Really weird.

@crash9877:

i ordererd this Gigabyte GA-J1900N-D3V 2 Weeks ago which came already with F3 Bios.

Everything worked (Sophos, IPFire, VYos etc) . Couldn´t install on my 128gb Crucial SSD Pfsense. During formatting process it showed me Read Error etc. so i thought my SSD got problems but everything else worked.

Yesterday i finally got pfsense on it setting Bios F4 to Storage UEFI First and the rest to Legacy. CSM to Legacy and Uefi and after that PFsense would install flawlessly without a hitch.

ah, i used the 64bit Version of PFsense.

I'm still running the F2 BIOS since it appears to be running strong but would randomly hit the EFI shell during updates / restarts. It was frustrating since the box was headless and I couldn't really replicate it elsewhere. At that time I had the following settings:

CSM Support: Enabled
Boot Option Filter: Legacy Only
Network: Do not launch
Storage: Legacy Only
Video: Legacy Only
Other PCI Devices: Legacy Only

I added a head a few weeks ago so I had a chance to play around a bit after bringing everything down for the 2.3 update anyway. After trying a few combinations of settings as suggested above (or the best I can make out of them) I wound up with the above settings however only changing:
Storage: Legacy First

…after about 10-15 reboots I didn't have the EFI shell come up again. That isn't a total confirmation, but much better than the EFI shell every 1-3 boots that I was getting before.

fostytou

Interesting update on an issue with the board…

I've been successfully running the board for a little while right now, but on 6/3/2016 around 6AM (according to RRD Charts) "something" happened. I didn't notice until the morning of 6/7 when I was having some issues with a VPN connection from a local machine to an external server and attempted to login to check the connection. The login screen was covered in errors and did accept a correct login but brought me right back to the same screen (unsuccessful logins did notify me the credentials were incorrect). Now that I have a head on the machine to check I went to look at it - unfortunately my successful logins had scrolled the screen buffer a bit, but there was an error message about a Disk full / Disk missing that was about to roll off the screen. I didn't want to reboot right away until I had some work done (and the VPN issue turned out to be with that VPN host) since I was worried I had a failed disk and did not want to be inoperable.

Later that night I was able to bring up the numerical command screen, but unable to actually successfully run any of the commands. Pushing the front button sent a correct shutdown / kill and the box powered down. It took 2 boots (which is still not out of the ordinary for me... I think I'm still on the F2 BIOS) where it went to the UEFI shell, then after the 3rd boot attempt the machine started and shut itself down a handful of times without any screen output. A "Gigabyte Ultimately Reliable" boot image came up and the board notified me that the main BIOS was corrupted. It automatically recovered from the backup BIOS after a few minutes of working at copying it to the main BIOS, and the system booted fine afterwards.

Unfortunately my last 5,000 log entries don't go back far enough and I'm not familiar enough with the date mask to know how to use it. If someone can give me more info on the date mask I may be able to pull more info from the general system logs.

BobbyB

Sorry about dropping the ball with the updates. Work and family life got super busy. Since 2.3.2 just came out, I'm going to give it a try soon I hope and report back. As of now, I'm still rocking my old Smoothwall, but I REALLY want to get this thing in place. Are others having "okay" results with this board?

jdubin

I've been using this mainboard since September (about 10 months) with only one non-critical issue (issue obtaining IP via DHCP w/ spoofed MAC address and 2wire modem). It's been perfectly stable. If I had to do it again, I'd seriously consider a board with Intel NICs (unless the pfSense project/FreeBSD is able to get a better handle on Realtek NICs), but if that's not a deal breaker, then this board is completely fine.

RussellB

@RussellB:

I have been using the GA-J1900N-D3V with pfSense for about a month. This is my first router build and I did not have any problems other than a memory stick which was not compatible and caused the system to fail to boot. (I ended up using a memory stick out of a laptop; the new memory stick worked fine in the laptop.) I am using an Intel Dual NIC since I had read a lot of problems with Realtek NICs. I purchased the Intel PWLA8492MT PRO/1000 MT PCI/PCI-X Dual Port Server Adapter:

http://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00006HX1V

I am getting 150Mbps down and 12Mbps up and my CPU utilization goes to about 30%. The rest of the time CPU utilization sits between 0% and 3%.

This is a home router, so I am not running any VPNs. I have Snort installed, but I am still trying to figure it out.

I can't speak for enterprise use, but as a home router, this thing is awesome.

For WiFi I installed an Ubiquiti Networks UAP-AC-LR-US 802.11ac Long Range Access Point. I mounted it on the ceiling in the center of our 2200 sq ft single story house and get awesome wireless coverage throughout.

I have to qualify what I previously wrote about the Gigabyte GA-J1900N-D3V. I just upgraded to Cox Gigablast and my little pfSense router was just not up to the task. Using the dual Intel NIC in the PCI slot the fastest I could get was about 350Mbps down and up. When I moved my WAN to one of the onboard Realtek ports, I got about 500Mbps down and 700Mbps up; this was the fastest configuration. Unfortunately, the Netflix R6300v2 Cox gave me can manage over 900Mbps down and up. I think the PCI bus on the GA-J1900N-D3V is too limited for a gigabit connection. If you are planning on upgrading to a gigabit connection the GA-J1900N-D3V just won't cut it.

jdubin

@RussellB:

I think the PCI bus on the GA-J1900N-D3V is too limited for a gigabit connection.

No surprise that PCI doesn't have the bandwidth for gigabit, never mind dual gigabit on the same bus! But you still have that mini-PCIe socket which could prove useful using something like this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Mini-PCI-E-to-PCI-E-Express-1X-USB-Riser-Card-with-FFC-Cable-Up-to-2-5Gpbs-/262289991565
Combined with a cheap server-class dual Intel NIC which seem to be quite cheap on eBay these days, I'd bet your throughput would be significantly improved.