any help would be much appreciated.

i am also using squid3
didnt find clear cache option

how do i use ssh ?

it's easy.  go to "system -> advanced -> admin access" and make sure to tick the "enable secure shell" box.  then click save.  next, download a program called winscp, its free.  once you've installed winscp, run it and click on "session" on the tree.  put in your "hostname" which will be your pfsense box ip, the default port number of 22 is what pfsense is set to unless you changed it somehow.  put your "root" username and password in and hit login.  you should get a prompt regarding a key or something, just accept it.  you can then browse your pfsense box's file system on the right pane.  the left pane is your computers file system.

not to push you away from pfsense, i only mention this because its floating around in my head as well.  you might look at smoothwall.  it looks to be a more newb friendly interface.  i'm struggling with wrapping my mind around some of the technical stuff in pfsense and might demo smoothie myself.  i'm gonna give pfsense a shot first though and hopefully learn a little on the way.  just a though.

my main goal is to get everything setup to be able to download, stream, whatever with out it affecting my gaming.  i'm close, but when usenet is downloading i still get fluctuating ping during BF3.  might be 50 then jump to 150 or so.  when monitoring the queue via my phone whilst gaming, everything seems to be going to the proper queue and enough bandwidth seems to be provided to bf3, but it still fluctuates and isn't acceptable.  i'm feeling my way through this and am a newb trying to learn this.  i'm use to wally world, best buy routers, but they just weren't cutting it.


rules for bf3 ........... should any of these be floating?  if so, why?

Yeah, brand new 8 port giga switch , couldn't have left the case on it, that would have been tacky. 

I wasn't terribly comfy with the psu exposed, so I put a plexi shield on top for a bit of protection.  I have no children and its mounted in a closet so im not too worried.  Ill use this as an entry into pfsense and try to learn then later on build me something a bit more conventional.

i was going to purchase a atom or alix setup, but i already had purchased this and wanted the higher power cpu and it gave me a project to fool with.  i'll see how the electric bill goes, but i've never noticed much of a difference in the bill, even when i use to leave my gaming tower running 24/7 (hexacore o'clocked and crossfire setup).

here's a few pics of what i ended up with, not pretty, but it works and was fun to build.

as an update, i did get this sorted out.  posting the info in the event it may help someone else.




first off..... its been years and years since i've had schooling in electronics, circuits, etc, etc.  i mostly just fumbled around and guessed whilst hoping to not cook something on the board.

ok, so here's what went down on the fan removal process.....

i started out testing the voltage on the headers while the server was running.  only two showed voltage with reference to ground.  they only had ~6v on them as the fans weren't running full bore at that time.  for whatever reason, at this time the speed sensor wires showed no voltage on them. 

next i decided to remove a stacked fan assembly so i could break it down, trace wires and see what i was really dealing with.  turns out, its wasn't anything special......

just two 3-wire fans.




the wires in the header are as follows.....

[COLOR="Red"]red[/COLOR] = +12v
[COLOR="Blue"]blue[/COLOR] = RPM Sensor
black = ground
[COLOR="Silver"]grey [/COLOR]= ground
[COLOR="Gray"]double grey[/COLOR] = ground
[COLOR="Lime"]green[/COLOR] = RPM Sensor
[COLOR="DarkOrange"]orange[/COLOR] = +12v





i then, took a small 12v battery and put that to the red and black wires of a fan to power it and used my multimeter to see if a voltage was output on the rpm sensor.  there was indeed and it showed a ~6v or 7v signal which then led me to the idea of putting some voltage to the rpm sensor wire on the header.  i also measured the resistance across the blue and black wires, this gave me about 60 ohms.  from that sprung the idea of using a resistor to simulate a fan as well as hopefully give me a correct signal with which to put to the sensor wire (blue and green wires).

as luck would have it i just so happened to have some 1/2 watt 68 ohm resistors among a few scattered bits i had laying around.  i initially used just one resistor to replace only one of the 8 fans in the fan assembly.  the resistor however was a bit warm to the touch.  i could hold it just fine without any fear of getting burned.  but just to make sure it wouldn't burn out i used four resistors in series/parallel.   i'm not sure if that makes the capacity only 1 watt or 2 watt.  either way, it should cope fine.

how the resistor is wired  (very crude)




instead of doing this for every header, i decided to try jumping the RPM signal to each header which worked brilliantly.

finished harness....... or whatever you would call it.....








not sure if anything else needs be added.  if any questions, just ask.  i've prolly forgotten something.  like i said, i mostly fumbled my way through this and got lucky.

thanks again for the replies.  i'm going to play around with this for the next few days and see what i can make heads and tails of.  i'll have more questions for sure.  either way...... i see my wndr4000 to likely be hitting the f.s. section of the computer forums i frequent.

yeah, that helps some.  thanks for taking the time to reply.  so what determines the port used on the source side?  are they randomly chosen or application specific?

as for bf3 working fine..... (if im understanding this somewhat) it works because my pc sent packets out, which the nat saw and then allows the replying packets back through.  if for whatever reason a bf3 server just tried to randomly send a packet to my pc, the nat would reject it because my pc had made no such request..... correct?

i'll have to play with the traffic shaper, but do i need to know the ports of bf3, sabnzbd, vnc, and whatever other apps i use in order to effectively setup the shaper?  furthermore do i have to setup port forwards for apps, even if they are working fine without an existing port forward rule in order to use the shaper?

i've finally altered a dl320 in a manner than i can keep it in my closet running without it sounding like a 747.  so, i just yesterday loaded pfsense up on it and removed my wndr4000 from my very small network. 

network laid out as follows

modem -> pfsense box -> network switch -> wireless ap and ethernet connected pc

honestly i'm still trying to wrap my head around what a nat is and how it relates/differs from the firewall rules.  i'm a nerd, but only at a upper novice level when it comes to networking.  all i've dealt with is off the shelf routers, such as the wndr4000, and of course to open a port it was a simple matter of going to the "port forward" tab and punch in a bit of info.  thus far in pfsense i've managed to open a few ports via the nat port forward, but i'm still trying to learn.

i guess what i'd like to know is a bit more about the purpose of the firewall rules and how they relate to nat, perhaps more info on nat as well.

how do i know where to assign the firewall rule... wan, lan or both?

i also would like to know more about how pfsense works regarding the opening of ports.  for instance i thought i would have to open all sorts of ports to play bf3.  but bf3 played fine without me doing a single thing....... why?

im curious about traffic shaping as that is really one of the biggest reasons i wanted to try pfsense.  i want to be able to play bf3 and be completely unaffected by my wife streaming something or a usenet download that will completely saturate my available bandwidth from my isp.

i've tried reading some of the how to's and whatnot on the forums and wiki but much of it seems pretty technical and i grasp bits and pieces.  if anyone has a good, dumbed down source that would explain some of this stuff that would be great too.  i currently have a networking for dummies book that i've been looking through trying to further my understanding of networking in general.

hopefully someone can help point me in the right direction.  other questions will come, but this is what i can think of right now.

thanks in advance, hope i'm making sense.

Yeah, I think 7 pins and it powers 2 fans.  I'd have to look again.

if i can figure out the pinouts for the fan headers, i'm seriously considering just keeping the 320.  if i can remove the noisy fan assembly i can mod the case to fit a new cpu cooler and perhaps a couple 90mm fans or maybe even a nice big 120mm (haven't measured yet).  i'm just not sure how i would go about defeating the mobo's fan fault protection.  any one that can provide insight into this would be appreciated. 

Thanks for that info as well Steve. I'm just a wanna-be nerd and hope to eventually have a nice server built and perhaps a more extensive home network setup. I don't have a real need for isolating the wifi from my LAN at the moment, but I could always change my mind regarding that. My main interest in pfsense, or even smoothwall for that matter, is traffic shaping. I can't really tell that my current wndr 4000 does much of anything regarding qos.  So I figured I'd go this route and then hopefully learn a thing or two along the way.

ahhh.  so for traffic that would be client to client on my local network the pfsense box wouldn't even be in the equation, the switch would handle that?  so with that logic, a gigabit nic on the pfsense box is unnecessary.... correct?  if so, i've seen some dual 10/100 nic alix setups on ebay that should suffice?

.........quite eye opening

Complete noob here.  Looking forward to utilizing pfsense.

Picked up a DL320 G3 from eBay to play around with and to also try to learn pfsense in order to implement it in my simple home network. The 320 functions fine and I ran pfsense some this past weekend without issue. The problem I'm having is the fans on the 320, when placed in a closet with no real airflow, they sound like a 747.  I can hear them throughout the house and it just wont cut it for 24/7 use. So, if anyone has any recommendations about how to tame the fan noise that would be great. If not, then I'm entertaining the idea of selling the 320 and trying a mini itx atom or via setup. My only concern is whether or not an atom/via setup will be able to handle Gigabit LAN for pushing files around or any streaming of files. Not sure if it makes any difference but my current ISP service is 20Mb down 2Mb up.

Thanks in advance.