PfSense with Gigabyte GA-J1900N-D3V

Hudrator

Hey everybody,

I would like to ask the owners of the board to give a little feedback about the performance in daily use.
Specially i would like to know about following topics:

Performance when useing OpenVPN with 1 to 5 Clients at the same time / multiple instances of OpenVPN
LAN - LAN Routing performance with the Realtec NICs
Performance with Proxmox / XEN and different Host-Systems ontop ( likely pfsense )

Thanks in advance

@messerchmidt:

the Celeron j is a pig without aes-ni

http://us.hardware.info/reviews/5334/24/amd-am1-vs-intel-bay-trail-d-review-cheap-desktop-platforms-benchmarks-truecrypt-71-aes-+-aes-ni

Took a quick look at the article. Nice feature but when taking a look at compatible Mainboards, you will start crying… ;)
So far I only found 11 Mainboards whitch are compatible. All with just 1 NIC, and DDR3 normal size (imho s0-DIMM is the new Standard)

So give me one Board with Dual NIC / S0-DIMM for nearly the same price as the Gigabyte GA-J1900N-D3V and i'm willing to buy and test.
;D

FarmerB3d

So I'm a few months in now with this board and cannot complain.

It sips electricity
It handles my BB connection (160/12) without breaking out a sweat.
It does far more than I could ever do with DD-WRT (Apples and Oranges)
It runs very cool (M350, no fan, hovers around 51-52c)
The CPU ticks along, never going above 10% when doing speed test over open VPN, 160Mb/s down with compression turned on
You need to run the latest Alpha code (totally stable for me, I don't upgrade automatically though, no point)
The realtec NICS - I think I might have found their problem side

Hudrator

So the first impressions with pfsense on this board:

BIOS Version F3
WLAN Card Archos 9280 Chipset
Pfsense 2.2 Beta Snapshot from 05.10.14

-Installation from USB worked well.
-When configuring the WAN interface, I faced some Problems
Receiving DHCP lease from my cable network
–> problem solved by switching from Realtec NIC to an additional Intel NIC
(Not sure if this Problem is driver related)
-I hardly tried to setup dualband Wlan. Wasn't capable cause settings were over written by the different clones of the wireless interface. Seems that there are still some bugs.
Had to reinstall pfsense all the time to get rid of old configurations.
Hopefully there will be some further development till release of 2.2

godsfshrmn

I've been looking at this board. Does anyone have any experience using it with gigabit WAN? I believe I saw 250 with some CPU headroom but I wanted to be sure.

Edit: there appears to be a revision 2.0 hardware on gigabytes website. Anyone tried it?

Logger79

First a great big thanks to w00t!

With w00ts bios settings the install was a breeze, no kernel panic, no nothing. I used "pfSense-memstick-2.1.5-RELEASE-arch.img.gz".

I would recommend this write up on bios update: http://www.gigabytenordic.com/wordpress/flash-update-bios-gigabyte-bay-trail-motherboards-j1800-j1900/

@godsfshrmn:

I've been looking at this board. Does anyone have any experience using it with gigabit WAN? I believe I saw 250 with some CPU headroom but I wanted to be sure.

Edit: there appears to be a revision 2.0 hardware on gigabytes website. Anyone tried it?

I'm using the onboard NICs and they seem to work just fine, but I've only got a 100 Mbit so I don't know how they behave at higher speeds.

I bought my motherboard last month and it shipped with F2; I couldn't find any version markings on it, I looked for it though.

nzimmers

Hi all

I have a GA-J1900N-D3V on the way and noticed it has a mini Pci-e slot, and was wondering if anyone has tried a mini-pcie ssd.

for example: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA1K62383992&cm_re=mini_pcie_ssd--20-609-436--Product

I've seen conflicting information on the net (imagine that) some to the effect that it depends on the kind of link to the architecture (USB or SATA or something else) while other places say mini-pcie is universal and should work.

The case I'm getting should have enough room to accept a card that is a little larger (here's the case): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811815042

Your thoughts appreciated….

nz

godsfshrmn

I received my board today and I wanted to report back. I'm fortunate to have municipal broadband here, and it is 1gbps. I went through the install process and got it to boot from the USB stick. I ran a speed test and was only seeing about 550mbps. I typically see 850+ consistently. I'd like to try checking "disable hardware checksum offload" under System > Advanced > Networking, but it doesn't save on rebooting. I'm getting >80% load on core0 and 30% on core1, while the rest remain idle. System load doesn't really move, but there are a ton of interrupts.

I'm having problems booting from the SSD I have installed. I've saved everything to the SSD and used the quick default settings. When I reboot, I see the "F6 PXE Boot: F1" lines and essentially enter a reboot loop. It does not report any errors. Any thoughts? I've tried all kinds of different BIOS settings without any success.

nzimmers

@godsfshrmn:

I received my board today and I wanted to report back. I'm fortunate to have municipal broadband here, and it is 1gbps. I went through the install process and got it to boot from the USB stick. I ran a speed test and was only seeing about 550mbps. I typically see 850+ consistently. I'd like to try checking "disable hardware checksum offload" under System > Advanced > Networking, but it doesn't save on rebooting. I'm getting >80% load on core0 and 30% on core1, while the rest remain idle. System load doesn't really move, but there are a ton of interrupts.

I'm having problems booting from the SSD I have installed. I've saved everything to the SSD and used the quick default settings. When I reboot, I see the "F6 PXE Boot: F1" lines and essentially enter a reboot loop. It does not report any errors. Any thoughts? I've tried all kinds of different BIOS settings without any success.

godsfshrmn, which bios version are you running on the motherboard?

amunrara

man, this board is a big headache :(

i received it 3 days ago, and after hours of suffering, i got it running.
…and i don´t even know how i made it work lol
soon, i am getting a wifi card, i think its going to be another headache..

godsfshrmn

@nzimmers:

@godsfshrmn:

I received my board today and I wanted to report back. I'm fortunate to have municipal broadband here, and it is 1gbps. I went through the install process and got it to boot from the USB stick. I ran a speed test and was only seeing about 550mbps. I typically see 850+ consistently. I'd like to try checking "disable hardware checksum offload" under System > Advanced > Networking, but it doesn't save on rebooting. I'm getting >80% load on core0 and 30% on core1, while the rest remain idle. System load doesn't really move, but there are a ton of interrupts.

I'm having problems booting from the SSD I have installed. I've saved everything to the SSD and used the quick default settings. When I reboot, I see the "F6 PXE Boot: F1" lines and essentially enter a reboot loop. It does not report any errors. Any thoughts? I've tried all kinds of different BIOS settings without any success.

godsfshrmn, which bios version are you running on the motherboard?

I'm running F3. I decided to try and snatch one of those Lenovo TS130's that have been frequently on sale recently and put an intel nic in it. I don't think the realtek nic is up to handling as much bandwidth.

amunrara

if anybody needs extra nics…this one works fine with 2.2 and giga

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cable-Matters-SuperSpeed-Gigabit-Ethernet/dp/B00C50FSPU/ref=sr_1_24?ie=UTF8&qid=1417637549&sr=8-24&keywords=Cable+Matters

nzimmers

Just got my board and one of the Beta 2.2 seems to recognize everything including this Intel dual NIC: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00006HX1V/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s08?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Last time i ran PFSense was back in 2007, so it will take me a bit to figure everything out and see if things are working fine but so far so good.

One thing I will mention is that it's finicky on the ram, has to be 1.35v and can't be faster ram than specified.

tpf

Hi guys,
got my board yesterday and tried to get it working many times. BIOS is on F3, I've read the post about the correct settings here, after getting the described problems every boot. Installation from USB @ HDD stucks at 38%, multi-core support can't be disabled in BIOS, so I installed pfS on another system an put the HDD back on the Gigabyte board. pfS is booting, LAN and webinterface works so far.My WAN get's no IP und don't switch to 1000 MBit. Link goes up und down multiple times und stuck at 10 MBit :-\

I'm not amused :P

stephenw10

What is the WAN connected to? Sounds like it failing to auto-negotiate a link correctly. Try adding a switch between the WAN and whatever device it's connected to. You could try forcing the speed/duplex but Realtek NICs can be a bit difficult in that area.

Steve

tpf

My WAN is connected to a NETGEAR GBit-Switch. The same NIC works great on Windows 7.

fostytou

I just wanted to report that I've been running this board little issue since the end of september.

I was able to do the DOS based BIOS upgrade with ease from a USB stick (F3 I think). The install took some minor creativity but worked pretty smoothly. I was able to install an Intel 32GB SSD and enable TRIM which has been great. 4GB of memory seems like overkill for my household usage. I'm using internal NICs and running 2.2a built on 10/3 for now. Its powered by a PicoPSU 80.

Sips power at 13W most of the time, but I did see fluctuations + 1.5W when installing and doing other heavy activity.

The one catch I have is that a reboot or hard boot after power failure when no monitor is connected will result in an error when booting from the SSD. It has only happened twice so it hasn't been a huge issue. The first time I hooked it to a monitor, did a proper shutdown, and it booted fine. The second time I turned it off after some alert beeps, turned it back on (maybe twice, but I think only once), and eventually heard the familiar PF boot alert.

This thing has been great for me so far, and since I don't expect awesome service speeds any time too soon I think it should serve me well for a few years while paying for itself in power. Thanks for the tips!

nzimmers

I've had this board from the beginning of December and all seems to be working great now - I had some challenges getting the right settings in PfSense (as I'm pretty new to it) which was most of my problems. However, one thing I would like to comment on is that in addition to the bios settings previously listed I had to set CSM to all legacy settings (and disable Network) and for "IDE configuration" I set everything to IDE, and then AFTER install I set it back to AHCI Mode - made a world of difference as did the most recent RC2.2 from Dec 22nd. I'm still in the testing phase (can't hook this up until I know it works and works well otherwise the wife and kids will scowl at me for messing with the home network again!) but thus far, I have Snort, PFblocker, and Squid running fine on it, all services are up and no material issues that I can tell.

I did notice that when I push a 1GB file from the squid proxy cache to a machine snort push up cpu utilization to about 43% at 450Mbps transfer rate, but downloading the same size package over my 50Mbps internet connection the CPU utilization is only 12%….so for stuff over the internet this board has a lot of headroom.

I plan to test out Open VPN soon (learning curve will be a challenge) but very impressed with Pfsense and the GA-J1900N-D3V capabilities.

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?

nzimmers

follow the instructions here: http://www.gigabytenordic.com/wordpress/flash-update-bios-gigabyte-bay-trail-motherboards-j1800-j1900/

it updates automatically If I reall correctly

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.