Nice!

Open load balancer from the services menu, setup a new pool and select failover in stead of load balance.

Full install with embedded kernel on another machine and transfer the drive over, right?

Exactly. I have several embedded systems (Soekris and Alix) running and upgraded some of them with a HD to be able to use packages (squid, freeswitch, etc), works fine for me.

Correct, some of the packages including squid generate a lot of read/write cycles, it is not impossible to use them on a flash card setup but these cards have a limited amount of write cycles before they start to die off. Therefore it is better to use a real HD.

I buy my parts mostly in Germany (found a web shop there that does not charge you 15 Euro for a 15 cm 44 pins IDE flat cable) and have it shipped over to my house in NL.

Some of the ALIX have a 44 pin IDE interface, so they are still an option.

You'll need to 'learn' the 192.168.53.1 pfsense box that it needs to use the 192.168.53.254 box as a gateway to reach 192.168.54.0.
I think a static route will do the trick.

I'm mostly dealing with embedded hardware, for the bandwidths I work with that is more than sufficient.
Depending on the WAN bandwidth and structure of traffic you'll need some more muscle. If you look in the hardware section of forum you'll find some threads discussing Hardware specs vs performance.

  Your welcome!

Do you still have a workstation with IDE interface? I use an ide 2.5" > 3.5" (cost $10) whenever installing hard drives for pfsense devices. Maybe this will get you better results then with the notebooks.

What happens if you let the installer CD run completely and then choose option 99 to install to hard disk. I seem to remember running into similar problems on a net5501. After choosing the install option booting failed. Installing via menu option 99 worked like a charm.

Configuring Sip trunks can be quit challenging. However it is possible and there are many examples on this forum on how to go about with PfSense and Asterisk. When you analyze the current use of ports for the voip PBX in your network you'll have a good idea what ports need to be opened up on Pfsense.

If I understood this correctly you do not want load balancing but Multi WAN. If you setup pfsense with the two WAN connections you can specify what traffic to route where in what direction. So yes pfsense can do this (and a lot more).
If this will be manageable depends on the structure of the network and the services in use between the offices.

I get the same timeout and I'm not behind a pfsense box at the moment.
It seems the problem is not the pfsense specific but something in the payment-processing-solutions.com solution. It may require additional ports opened or something like that.

Hi Fribert,

If your not in a hurry I can help you in the right direction.

Can you show the NAT, WAN and WAN2 rules? That way it is a lot easier to determine if its just a configuration problem or something else.

Like Jimp I use this on several pfsense boxes without problems.

You can use one of the embedded images on your hard drive, that worked for me. When that works upgrade it to a full version via console or web interface. However you won't be able to use the full disk capacity. I had this running on a ide drive including the freeproxy package.
If this is not working there might be an issue with the boot sequence or the hd is not recognized by the hardware.

When I replaced the hard drive later by a solid state model I just hooked it up in a different pc and ran the full install from CD, restored the configuration and that is running for several months without any problems now.