I spent the weekend setting up pfSense on a new piece of kit that I got last week. A reseller on Amazon is selling a bare bones box with 4 ethernet ports, a Celeron J1900 processor, 2Gb of RAM and a 64Gb SSD for £170, which I thought would be perfect for the task. It’s probably a little over-spec’ed if anything, but it’s a really lovely piece of kit.

I spent the entirety of the install process navigating various options in the Aptio BIOS interface. I had two issues. The first was pretty trivial, which was setting the boot order via ‘HD BBS Priorities’. The option above, ‘Boot Option’ seemed like the more likely but didn’t have any effect.

The second took me hours to figure out. I could see lots of Google hits for BSD installs and runtime issues, but nothing that fit the problem that I was having. During the install a command called bsdlabel hung, and then returned an error, ‘WRITE_EPDMA_QUEUED’, followed by ‘CAM status: command timeout’.

To cut a [very] long story short, I fixed it by setting SATA CONFIG -> SATA Mode -> IDE Mode.

It took me so long to get the install working I’ve not had a chance to play with pfSense itself yet, other than to prove it’s working. One immediate challenge I’ve yet to figure out is how to access the web interface if it’s ‘north’ of a wireless access point….