Some time late last year, I decided that most off-the-shelf
routers are terrible and I needed to find a better solution. After looking high
and low on the interwebs I settled on pfSense, a FreeBSD based firewall. The
only thing I needed was another network port, so after some research I bought a
dual port Intel NIC on eBay. That didn't work out so well. I was running VMWare
ESXi 4.0 which wouldn't cooperate; giving me PSOD's. Thinking that ESXi 4.1
would solve the problem, I then took the risk of upgrading. The reason I say
risk is because to this day I haven't figured out how I got ESXi to work on the
MCP73 nForce chipset. I had to uncomment a driver in some file to load the
nv_sata.o file. Thankfully upgrading didn't mess up the config file.
Unfortunately this didn't solve my PSOD, so it was back to looking for a
compatible NIC. Finally, I settled on a single port Broadcom. This worked great
and I've had no problems at all, so far. Great this is working out, so I
thought.