pfSense 2.4 Release Candidate Now Available

[jwh7]

Honestly, combination of "older hardware" and "Realtek" makes one crappy combo. There is a good reason why majority go with Intel NICs. Drivers and hardware are just better.

I'm not talking about Pentium 3 hardware, for example, even though that would be fine too, for someone with slow service. :-) There's a reason for a hardware requirements page; OPNsense is more conservative. I've been running a mini ITX with on-board dual gigabit and a low-power Athlon X2 5050e for 2 years and works great. The pfSense "all non-Intel is schit" mentality, among other things, is what has driven me to recommend OPNsense. They were willing to help fix a BSD driver issue (with Suricata) by replacing it with the open manufacturer version. pfSense not only berated people in the forums requesting the same, they soon deleted the thread.

[aht0]

well, I had several discrete Realtek NICs in a pfSense setup. Shit crashed the machine multiple times a day. There was nothing else conclusive suggesting me Realtek was at fault, except for pfSense forums and the fact of crashes stopping AFTER I got myself dual Intel NICs for replacement. Only USB NICs are (by nature) more unstable than old Realtek's. Mystical reboots came back when I changed motherboards and decided to try it's integrated RTL8169 LAN port, although crashes did not happen daily. Had to give up using RTL port completely in order to have pfSense fully stable.