Stability issues (THANKS VIA) !
So after a bunch of network break downs and a whole bunch of troubleshooting without any real results until this morning when I figured out what caused the major instabilities in our network. It seems like a mix of the VIA EPIA-M700-15 platform and a instability of power.
A few weeks ago, one of the onboard network card’s burned off which had caused a lot of bad packages from and to our network through a very long time, we finally replaced the card and stumpled over these brilliant issues.
We’ve ordered some new hardware, which should arrive around Tuesday / Wednesday so during the night I will shut down all services and install the new router/fw.
So what does the current setup look like and what will the new one look like?
| New hardware | Old hardware | |
| CPU | Intel Atom D510 1.66GHz, Dual core (With HT) | VIA C7 1.5 GHz, Single Core |
| Motherboard | ASUS AT5NM10-I | VIA EPIA-M700-15 |
| Memory | 2x Kingston 2GB 667MHz DDR2 | Kingston 2GB 667MHz DDR2 |
| Hard Drive | WD Scorpio Blue 120GB 2.5″ SATA | WD Scorpio Blue 120GB 2.5″ SATA |
| NIC 1 | Realtek® RTL8112L PCIe – 1000Mbit | Velocity VT6130 – 1000Mbit |
| NIC 2 | D-Link DGE-528T – 1000Mbit | D-Link DGE-528T – 1000Mbit |
| Operating System | pfsense 1.2.3-RELEASE | pfsense 1.2.3-RELEASE |
As you can see it will be a bit of a performance boost. Firstly Dual core with the possibility to run HT (HyperThreading). A raise in the memory to 4 GB instead of 2 GB, and hopefully the NIC will last a bit longer then the ones VIA provided onboard.
As goes for the VIA cards, I will never ever recommend VIA to anyone, this is probably the poorest board I’ve ever worked with. To make things worse the first one I got was DOA.
Before the VIA I had another one of Intel’s ATOM boards and it ran perfectly and it still does at a friends place. So if you want to build your own Router/Firewall stay away from VIA and go with a INTEL board.