So in the past I've ran both pfSense and OPNSense on various hardware platforms.. vSphere, Dell Optiplex, a Nokia IP330 and now a Barracuda 410.
I picked this guy up for free yesterday from a friend specifically for this project. Now if you've Googled much you'll find people have had all sorts of issues running this hardware and it all boils down to the nic's 'Cuda decided to use. Their fairly proprietary and in the Cuda implementation, software controlled via a set of relays and the LPT port.
Now I don;t know how the Cuda folks code it, but a few people have had luck using the writeio and BCHW binaries as seen here: Netgate Forums
But me, being who I am and since this control, IMO, is more electrical than software driven I followed a suggestion from the link above.. sorting out the blue and black wires on the LPT header connector.
Using a tiny piece of solid conductor wire from some plenum rated CAT5e I shorted those two pins together with the connector unplugged from the header. During power up I cannot hear the relays click closed, but during power off you can hear them click open. In my testing so far (about 2 hours now) they have remained closed and a constant ping from my workstation has no dropped a packet yet.
So see, my figuring is, since there's separate wires leading from the RJ45 header on the two NICs to this relay board (and the front RJ45 ports) that the relays are acting as an on/off switch for this connectivity. I mean it's a shady thing to do but it does help Cuda maintain some *control* over the reuse of the hardware. I mean for folks like me.. I know this box is powered by a normal MSI motherboard with a decent Celeron proc. But I WANT to use it for the front network ports. To me there is no other reason to use this box without those ports.
So anyway, this works for me. And it involved zero packages, binaries nor messing with rc.d to make sure they work after a reboot.
Enjoy.
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