After last nights Chinese and large amount of beer / wine combo all I was greeted by this morning was a large dog poo and pool of piss. Can’t blame the dog at all, I know she would have tried to wake me and failed. She did look rather guilty though, and gave me that ‘I jumped on your head at 4AM and you failed to respond’ look. It rained constantly all morning so put off the normal dog walking session and moved back on to doing server experiments. Basically you can fill a machine with network cards and providing they are on the PCIe bus (including the built in NIC), they will always transfer at a pretty constant 942Mbps. If you use the PCI bus however then you get 778Mbps (Even with Intel cards), also I’m sure if I managed to get it going that transferring from two PCI cards would have been even slower. So anyway, now built the pfSense machine up, removed the hard disk and replaced with a flash memory card, installed 4 additional NIC’s, 2 PCIe and 2 PCI. So that gives me 3 high speed connections and two slower ones to choose from. I only need 4 network ports really, but I’m sure I’ll find a use for them all.

The amusing thing is I’be had to configure one of my Ubuntu PC’s to run minicom, as when you install the embedded kernel on pfSense you get no VGA driver. The last time I used a null modem cable I think was in the 80’s. Anyway, it’s installed and it boots fine from the flash card and all the tty appears on minicom. Just set up the firmware load for the wireless (otherwise you have to unplug it each time as the driver isn’t built into the kernel). Next step is to do some proper pfSense configuration, but that’s enough on it for today, but great progress.

Oh yes, for some reason I asked Jamie if he would dress up as Rainbow Dash and I could dress up as Derpy….he turned me down, but did enquire into how I suddenly knew so much about ‘My little pony’.