For the purposes of this article, I’m going to refer to a Windows 7 install, although, the concepts are the same for most windows installs.

There are 2 main factors to increasing windows performance.  I’ll address both of them in this article; Hardware and Software.

Hardware Tweaks:

Add More RAM: Adding more RAM (Maxing out the RAM capabilities of your Hardware) is going to give you the most bang for your buck.  This reduces swapping on your machine and that is a big plus.  Expect an immediate improvement with 15 min. worth of work.  RAM is cheap these days.  I would recommend Maxing it out on your machine.

Install an SSD: Ahh, the panacea of serious performance.  Solid State Drives (SSD) are just incredible.  They move data at insane speeds.  Boot up your OS, open apps, documents, etc. at hundreds of Megabytes per second.  The other benefit?  You don’t have to be so gentle with your machine.  I throw my laptop on the table all the time without worry about bumps and bruises to the platters on a traditional mechanical drive.

Upgrade the CPU: This one is pretty important.  Go for not the newest, but the generation below the newest.  Get as many cores as you can.  If you have the RAM and the SSD, you’ll find that your bottleneck will either be IO to/from the disk or CPU.  I’m currently CPU and IO bound on windows.  I have a Macbook Pro with a Pegasus R6 drive running windows 7 x64.  My SSD doesn’t push data fast enough to the drive to make my backups consistently faster.  There is a way around that, but I’ll discuss that in the software section.  Reading from the Promise R6 is just insane.  Close to 1 GBps (That’s 1 GigaByte not gigabit).  Unfortunately, the CPU is what’s holding it up even with 8 cores of i7 sweetness.

For you Transcoder Geeks out there (Video / Audio), I would have to say GPU transcoding is the way to go.  If you’re doing average amateur transcoding and not pro transcoding, I would recommend an Nvidia CUDA accelerated card.  You don’t need to buy the top of the line, just the best you can afford that handles CUDA.  As for transcoding software, we’ll discuss that in the software section. I would recommend AMD, but there is very little that actually supports it out there now so for now, I’ll have to defer.

What about USB?  If you’re running a PC, I have to tell you that until Thunderbolt is officially available for all PCs, (unless you’re running Mac hardware  **snicker** see my last post about the promise), you’ll want to get USB 3.0 into the mix.  If you’re lucky enough to have the ports in your computer, you’re set.  If you have a laptop, get a USB 3.0 expansion card.  If you’re a desktop user a GOOD USB 3.0 card is very important.  Also, don’t skimp on the USB hub as well.  A crappy USB hub will slow you down more than it will speed you up.

I prefer and use the LaCie Hub4 USB 3.0 SuperSpeed Hub.  It’s a quality hub that does the job.  Photographers take note.  If you deal with Memory cards, get a good reader. I shoot Nikon and use CF cards so I bought the Lexar dual slot USB 3.0 reader.  Can I say it’s just absolutely amazing?  Fast as a rocket.

If you’re doing lots of encryption / decryption I’m going to recommend a good Encryption setup using a .  They’re not that expensive, but boy do they make a difference.

Software Tweaks that make a huge difference:

OK.  So let’s say the cash isn’t in your budget right now, because the economy just sucks and we know that the year before elections, everyone makes promises they have no intention of keeping.  So let’s just concentrate on the software tweaks that make a huge difference.

Clean up the Registry and DAT files:  You know those .DAT files in your user profile?  Notice how they just get bigger and bigger?  Well, those files have a habit of recording everything you do on your computer (hence their size).  This coupled with the registry bloat and you’ve got a complete and utter mess on your hands. Now we’ve all seen registry cleaners out there and half of them don’t work, but there is one that does.  It’s the Auslogics Registry Cleaner and The Auslogics registry Defragmenter (Both Part of the BoostSpeed Suite). They simply just work.  My dat files reduced themselves in size from over 700 MB to 40 MB.  Pretty serious difference, huh?  As for speed of the computer?  Let’s just say that It’s as fast as the day I installed the OS.

Defragment your drive:  This provides a significant increase in your drive response and faster load times.  Use the built in windows defragmenter.  While it will take hours to do, it makes a huge difference. DO NOT DO THIS IF YOU HAVE AN SSD DRIVE.  It doesn’t do anything on SSDs but wear the drive.

Lock the Windows Kernel into memory:  This makes a huge difference and is as easy as just simply editing a registry key.

As an administrator on your machine, start up regedit and go to the following location:

1.  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

2. DisablePagingExecutive will be on the right.  Set it to value one by double-clicking on it. This keeps the kernel in RAM and speeds up the machine quite a bit. Less Paging=less thrashing=faster computer.

Uninstall unwanted programs:  There have been many times you’ve installed and uninstalled programs.  Use Revo Uninstaller to uninstall your unwanted programs.  Don’t use the windows uninstaller.  Use REVO.  It gets rid of excess registry entries and files.

Turn off items that automatically start up in your windows startup routine:  The best way to do it is to go to a command prompt as administrator and type msconfig and just uncheck the things you don’t need started up like update managers and the ilk. This makes a huge difference and can actually cut minutes off your windows start-up as well as reduce paging as well as make your computer “snappier”.  You’ll notice an immediate difference.

Update your Drivers: updated drivers do two things; reduce bugs and give you more functionality or better performance.  So update your drivers religiously.  Especially video drivers and storage drivers. NEVER use BETA drivers.

Clean out your hard drive:  I do this every week, but once every few months is fine too. The fewer files there are on your computer, the fewer index entries there are on your hard drive index table.  This means faster access.  Get yourself an Amazon S3 account and upload those files to an S3 Bucket.  It’s redundant and super cheap while allowing you to access those files when you need them.  In other words, archive it!  or just get an external hard drive and offload the data to the hard drive (although it doesn’t provide for data redundancy and protection).

Run Scandisk on your System Drive and All connected hard drives once a week:  This helps prevent any errors which filesystems are prone to have causing data corruption as well as performance decreases.  You’ll thank me for this one.. I promise.  How do you run scandisk?  open My Computer, right click on the drive and go to the tools tab.  If it’s the system drive it will ask you to schedule it for the next startup.  Click yes.  Keep in mind depending on the size of your drive, this could take a long time (upwards of an hour) so do this overnight.

For Specialty Users:

This is a section specially dedicated for what I call the specialty user or power user. You use your computer to it’s full potential or for specialty purposes.

Here is where I will address how to get even more out of your computer for your purpose.

For Video Editors and Transcoding: You’ll need more drives.  You shouldn’t be using a laptop, but a desktop workstation.  Get Xeon Processors and the best Nvidia graphics card you can afford that supports CUDA.  Use applications that support CUDA computational capabilities.  Just click on this link to see a few of them.

As for the Drives, you NEED RAID.  Get yourself a great hardware raid card.  Not an el-cheapo raid card that supports RAID in the driver, but actually on the card.  I recommend 3ware cards.  Best of breed in my book and all I ever use.  As for which level of RAID you should use, It depends.  I’m a power user who’s into performance + redundancy so I always do RAID 1+0  (not to be confused with RAID 0+1) which is a completely different and useless animal.

Read up on RAID here and decide which level of RAID you need.  The 3ware cards will most likely support it.  As for motherboards, I recommend SuperMicro Boards and Cases exclusively.  Why?  Check out the specs and how they’re built.  Better than anything I’ve seen on the planet.

Coupled with a 3ware raid card, some enterprise SAS ssds and the right processors and RAM, you can expect an insanely FAST and redundant system.

****NOTE / WARNING:   NEVER RUN RAID-0.  There is no redundancy and you will eventually come to regret it.  If you need the speed, RUN RAID-1+0.  That’s what I do exclusively.  While it costs an ARM and a LEG, I’ve had system uptimes of 5+ years with ZERO DATA LOSS****

Remember, chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link.  Buy Quality!!!!!!

Server Configurations:  While this is a tough one to deal with, it really depends on your server.  If running Microsoft, you’ll need to keep 2 things in mind.  RAM and Processor power.  XEON Processors with multiple cores and virtualization technology.  Trust me on this one.  A good motherboard with a proven solid chipset.  Do your research on the chipset!!!!  Do not use a low quality server board.  You will regret it in the future.  A good server board will be in the 500-1000.00 USD range.  Don’t skimp.  System Downtime costs more than that!

RAID:  Multiple drives with redundancy.  Hardware RAID only.  Again, see my page on RAID.

Here’s a common misconception and a mistake most NON-Enterprise Architects make.  RAID is NOT BACKUP.  So get yourself a good backup solution and make sure it works.  I recommend one off-site + one onsite.  You can never be too careful.  Unless you don’t care about your job.

Here are a couple of tips:

Database Servers: RAID 1+0 gives you redundancy + performance.  God Bless 3Ware.

Application / Media / Web Servers: Raid 1+0 or RAID-5.  If you’re serving up content, RAID-5 is fine.  If you’re writing as much as you are reading to the drives, add tons of memory, a fiber channel interface or use SSDs in a RAID configuration.  Then tune the crap out of it and use Amazon’s CDN to help reduce the load on your server.  It’s cheap, reliable, and extremely bulletproof.  Don’t make the mistake Netflix made by assuming one CDN choice from an unproven company is  a good solution.  Use someone else’s infrastructure whenever possible for Content Delivery.  It’s cheaper and will be better than anything you could possibly do on your own (budget wise).

Believe it or not, if you use linux (a proven server linux like Redhat or CentOS), your machines will run without hiccups once configured and tested thoroughly.

A properly configured linux server coupled with a good CDN will keep you running with very high uptime and reliability.  Don’t assume that just because you’re a Microsoft shop, you have to run Microsoft Solutions.  Linux and Microsoft are converging slowly.  Use the tools you can and you can save yourself an insane amount of money.

If you need help with a solution, I’m always available for consulting. Just check me out on linkedin and you’ll see I’ve got the qualifications.

Non-PC Hardware that makes a difference:

Network Switches and Cards: Get a good NIC card.  Intel Chipsets rock!  As for switches, get a non-blocking switch that handles Gigabit Ethernet.  I’m a power user so I’m using Used Cisco gear wherever possible.  You can pick it up for cheap and just buy the Service Warranty for it and you’re covered.  I love having 4 hour replacement gear in the middle of the night. Best warranty in the business.

Firewalls: Don’t even consider running a computer network or computer without a firewall.  It’s a disaster.  You will be hacked.  Read up on my Firewall post and save yourself some money and headache.

Important Note:  There is no such thing as set it and forget it.  You have to do maintenance on a computer to make run well.  If it’s your business, I suggest doing maintenance once a week or once a month at a minimum.  If you have a hard time finding a good sysadmin, contact me and I’ll happily work out a deal with you to work with your IT infrastructure. Don’t assume that the local PC guy you find on craigslist is going to be good.  Most of them have no enterprise experience and will use you as a learning experience.  NOT a good idea.  Find yourself someone who is multi-faceted with credentials.  You won’t be sorry.

I also have a post on recommended products for Linux, Windows, and Apple platforms. Click here to read it.

It will be constantly updated as long as I’m alive. So help me stay alive and donate to this site so I can afford to support my family.

Cheers.

If you find this post important and extremely useful, please donate.  Business has been slow and I have a family to support.  While I don’t like recommending amounts to donate, I’d love to see some $25.00 or more donations due to the fact that things haven’t really been shaping up for me lately, but every dollar counts.  Also, if you decide to buy something mentioned in this post, please use the links in this post, because I get a few pennies and right now, every penny counts.

Another way you could really help out is joining Childguard if you have an Android phone.  It’s free, ad-free and would really help to kickstart a business that could potentially give me some stability. 

I spend full time working on this blog and reviewing products (40 hours a week [my weekends])  Please help if you can.

3Ware RAID Cards: They’re one of the best in the industry.  They work and I’ve never lost data with them. Remember to buy the battery backup option.

Supermicro Cases: Talk about seriously over-engineered cases.  They cool well and are built to last. Quality beyond anything on the market.

OCZ SSD Drives:  The best on the market.  End of Discussion.

God knows there are plenty of different types of RAID.  This post explains the different RAID levels and *hopefully, it will help you pick the right configuration for you***

Note:  When in doubt, RAID 1+0 or RAID 10 is the failsafe.

So here are the different configurations:

• RAID 0 (block-level striping without parity or mirroring) has no (or zero) redundancy. It provides improved performance and additional storage but no fault tolerance. Hence simple stripe sets are normally referred to as RAID 0. Any drive failure destroys the array, and the likelihood of failure increases with more drives in the array (at a minimum, catastrophic data loss is almost twice as likely compared to single drives without RAID). A single drive failure destroys the entire array because when data is written to a RAID 0 volume, the data is broken into fragments called blocks. The number of blocks is dictated by the stripe size, which is a configuration parameter of the array. The blocks are written to their respective drives simultaneously on the same sector. This allows smaller sections of the entire chunk of data to be read off each drive in parallel, increasing bandwidth. RAID 0 does not implement error checking, so any error is uncorrectable. More drives in the array means higher bandwidth, but greater risk of data loss.

• In RAID 1 (mirroring without parity or striping), data is written identically to multiple drives, thereby producing a “mirrored set”; at least 2 drives are required to constitute such an array. While more constituent drives may be employed, many implementations deal with a maximum of only 2; of course, it might be possible to use such a limited level 1 RAID itself as a constituent of a level 1 RAID, effectively masking the limitation. The array continues to operate as long as at least one drive is functioning. With appropriate operating system support, there can be increased read performance, and only a minimal write performance reduction; implementing RAID 1 with a separate controller for each drive in order to perform simultaneous reads (and writes) is sometimes called multiplexing (or duplexing when there are only 2 drives).

• In RAID 2 (bit-level striping with dedicated Hamming-code parity), all disk spindle rotation is synchronized, and data is striped such that each sequential bit is on a different drive. Hamming-code parity is calculated across corresponding bits and stored on at least one parity drive.

• In RAID 3 (byte-level striping with dedicated parity), all disk spindle rotation is synchronized, and data is striped so each sequential byte is on a different drive. Parity is calculated across corresponding bytes and stored on a dedicated parity drive.

• RAID 4 (block-level striping with dedicated parity) is identical to RAID 5 (see below), but confines all parity data to a single drive. In this setup, files may be distributed between multiple drives. Each drive operates independently, allowing I/O requests to be performed in parallel. However, the use of a dedicated parity drive could create a performance bottleneck; because the parity data must be written to a single, dedicated parity drive for each block of non-parity data, the overall write performance may depend a great deal on the performance of this parity drive.

• RAID 5 (block-level striping with distributed parity) distributes parity along with the data and requires all drives but one to be present to operate; the array is not destroyed by a single drive failure. Upon drive failure, any subsequent reads can be calculated from the distributed parity such that the drive failure is masked from the end user. However, a single drive failure results in reduced performance of the entire array until the failed drive has been replaced and the associated data rebuilt. Additionally, there is the potentially disastrous RAID 5 write hole.

• RAID 6 (block-level striping with double distributed parity) provides fault tolerance of two drive failures; the array continues to operate with up to two failed drives. This makes larger RAID groups more practical, especially for high-availability systems. This becomes increasingly important as large-capacity drives lengthen the time needed to recover from the failure of a single drive. Single-parity RAID levels are as vulnerable to data loss as a RAID 0 array until the failed drive is replaced and its data rebuilt; the larger the drive, the longer the rebuild takes. Double parity gives additional time to rebuild the array without the data being at risk if a single additional drive fails before the rebuild is complete.
• RAID 10 or 1+0: Mirrored + Striped.  Allows full drive failure without data loss or performance.  Each Disk is mirrored and then striped.  The ideal solution for high performance + redundancy, but it will cost a pretty penny.  I only do RAID 1+0 for everything, because it provides the highest level of performance and redundancy.

Hopfully this helps in your raid primer.  There are more versions of RAID, but this covers the basics.

If you find this post important and extremely useful, please donate.  Business has been slow and I have a family to support.  While I don’t like recommending amounts to donate, I’d love to see some $25.00 or more donations due to the fact that things haven’t really been shaping up for me lately, but every dollar counts.  Also, if you decide to buy something mentioned in this post, please use the links in this post, because I get a few pennies and right now, every penny counts.Another way you could really help out is joining Childguard if you have an Android phone.  It’s free, ad-free and would really help to kickstart a business that could potentially give me some stability.  I spend full time working on this blog and reviewing products (40 hours a week [my weekends])  Please help if you can.

Apple doesn’t want to help, nor does promise regarding getting it working on Bootcamp.  Yes, you can kind-of use Parallels, but the reality is you’re going to get completely horrible speed.  This really isn’t a solution anyways, because it just adds tons of overhead to a system.

So I decided I’d start noodling around and figure out the problem. So here are the known factors:

Thunderbolt will work with Thunderbolt devices on the MAC and sometimes on the PC (depending on the device).

The Pegasys R4/R6 WILL WORK on Bootcamp (with a bit of trickery), because Apple doesn’t want it to work with Bootcamp. Just another way to move Windows users over to MAC OSX completely, although there are some of us that need the R4/R6 and it’s bandwidth capabilities over Thunderbolt on Windows (me included).

A Thunderbolt device will work on Bootcamp as long as it’s connected during startup, but daisy-chaining (is that even a word!?!!) to the primary device will allow hot plug Thunderbolt devices to work on secondary+ devices (if supported by Bootcamp).

I’m a smart duckie (at least that’s what I’m told).

First things first.. The evaluation or the problem.  Plugging a Pegasus into the Thunderbolt port and running apple updates (both apple and bootcamp side) gives us tons of updates (Mostly 2 EFI updates and the Thunderbolt drivers).

I booted up into bootcamp only to find out that device manager shows there’s a RAID controller made by Promise without the drivers.  So I get to thinking.. What other RAID controllers out there use the same controller chip?  PMC-Sierra’s PM8011. Well, seems like there are quite a few and after mucking around with all the big brand name drivers, none would install.  Now obviously, this is a problem.

Knowing what I know from the Linux world, drivers detect chipsets and that’s basically it.  So I figured I would do some hacking on my own.  After 2 days of trial and error, I come across a press release stating that PMC and Promise are building controllers that use this exact chip!  Woohoo!  That was the first major step in the right direction.

I figured out that the SuperTrak models use the PM8011 and simply downloaded the windows drivers.  You’d think it would be a straight-forward install right?  Wrong.  It didn’t work.  So poking around in the inf files, I realize that the PCI vendor and device IDs are missing for the RAID controller.

I simply modified the .inf file in the drivers for the SuperTrak and added a line as follows under the [Promise.ntamd64] location and did a driver update from device manager and what do you know!  It works!

%stexYosemiteDesc%=stex_Inst,PCI\VEN_105A&DEV_8760

This is the RAID controller PCI\Vendor ID for Promise: 105A and the Device: 8760 the windows Bootcamp version of the Raid controller.

I saw the controller and the Array pop-up in my device manager and immediately went to Disk Manager to see if it appeared.  Well, guess what?  It does!  Now, we’re not done.

You will need to boot into the MAC side of things and run the Pegasus R6 configuration utility to configure the array, but that’s not a big deal.  I set mine to RAID-5.

I decided I wanted to do something special and have access on both the MAC and Windows side, so I erased the disk and made it one big honkin HFS+ partition.

I went to Paragon Software and purchased HFS+ for windows + NTFS for mac and installed it.  Just because I like access to all my files without rebooting into one OS or another.  This is optional as you can partition all you want with the Disk Administrator in Windows.

Create Logical Drives, Format Them, do whatever you want.  Next comes the speed test.  Could I really achieve Thunderbolt like speeds from Bootcamp with my little hack?  Only a test will tell.  So I did the following:

Copied a 1.6GB RAR file from and to the array.  Avg speed? 311 MB/s.  Did this three times and to and from an SSD drive, I’d say It did pretty well.  I’m running a 512 GB Crucial CT512M4SSD2CCA M4 2.5″ 512GB Solid State Drive rated at

	Sequential Access – Read: Up to 415 MB/s (SATA 6Gb/s)
	Sequential Access – Write: Up to 260 MB/s (SATA 6Gb/s)

All the extra crap I’ve been running in the background makes it come pretty damn close to the limits on not Thunderbolt, but the SSD.  So I’d say I have some pretty good numbers.  The true test though is to test whether or not I’m going to get true Thunderbolt numbers that are a little more scientific.

So I installed a 2GB RAMdrive using DATARAM RAMDISK free version and did some performance testing on the ramdisk using Performance Test 7.0 Evaluation version.  Here are the results.  Please keep in mind my machine was transferring data from my expresscard 3.0 WD Mybook 2TB Drive to the Pegasys Array at the time, but still, the numbers are pretty impressive:

RamDisk: 2GB File 2GB Disk

Ramdisk Test

Now I decided to transfer the same 1.6GB file from the RAMDISK to the R6 Array while doing the USB 3.0 Transfer from expresscard / 34 adapter moving at 97.4 MB.  I was a little surprised when I pulled 1.09 GB/s coming from RAM to the Pegasys and on the way back, I was pulling around 900 MB/s.

So I’d have to say the Thunderbolt Hack was a success… Well, there’s one more test to complete, but I’ll have to get another SSD and stripe it in my macbook so I can truly see how this performs.

If you find this post important and extremely useful, please donate.  Business has been slow and I have a family to support.  While I don’t like recommending amounts to donate, I’d love to see some $25.00 or more donations due to the fact that things haven’t really been shaping up for me lately, but every dollar counts.  Also, if you decide to buy something mentioned in this post, please use the links in this post, because I get a few pennies and right now, every penny counts.

Another way you could really help out is joining Childguard if you have an Android phone.  It’s free, ad-free and would really help to kickstart a business that could potentially give me some stability.

Thank You Friends.

My next project will be to get the ATI RADEON stuff (APP / Stream) working on the Macbook Pro.

UPDATE: I was going to buy a second SSD to Stripe within the Macbook pro to test throughput (and because I wanted more space), but apparently, after doing some research, it turns out Apple Macbook Pros (Early 2011) have an issue with SATA III in the optical drive bay.  They don’t function reliably at SATA III, but function at SATA II.  Kind of a problem for a RAID-0 Stripe.   One SATA III + ONE SATA II = DISASTER and lots of lost time and data.  So, I ordered a 16GB RAM Kit to get myself some more performance. (and a larger RAM Drive) for testing to / from the R4/R6.

After a few days of testing with the R6 on Windows 7, I realized that running HFS on it was NOT a good Idea.  So I just reformatted the partition using Disk Manager as an NTFS partition and all is well. No data corruption, lightning fast speeds, and lots of safety for my data.

Note:  This may sound kind of funny, but now that I’ve got the bandwidth to do some serious data transfer at extremely high speeds, I’m annoyed that my SSD is the bottleneck in the equation.  A full 400 GB Bootcamp Partition via Acronis takes 56 minutes. (due to the compression overhead).

There’s one firewall that everybody doesn’t even think about. It’s open-source, has the ability to give you VPN access, Site to Site VPN inclusive, Load Balancing, SIP Proxying, and all of the functionality and performance of a Multi-Thousand Dollar solution without the cost.  All of this running on PC Hardware with no licensing fees.  I’ve replaced every customer’s firewall with pfsense.  Why?  Because, simply, it gives you all the flexibility and extensibility + more of the big box solutions for FREE.

Properly configured, they are extremely secure and can do more than all the big box solutions without the ridiculous licensing fees.

I run Site to Site VPNs between my offices and my houses all over the world.  Completely secure, completely redundant, and completely (nearly free).  After all, I actually pay for the hardware (I buy used Dell Desktops).

So this article will discuss exactly what it takes to make it happen for your home setup, business, or enterprise.  If you’re not an enterprise customer, the cost of the hardware is minimal.  If you’re an enterprise, a set of redundant, load balancing firewalls should cost you less than $2000.00 USD if even that much.

So Let’s get started.

pfsense is one of the unknown firewall distributions out there that is easy to install and extremely robust with over millions of installations worldwide.  It provides everything from transparent firewalling to proxying and more.  VPN capabilities, dynamic dns, VOIP proxying, Network Intrusion, Network Statistics reporting, thousands of connections capacity, high throughput, and did I mention my favorite? Support from experienced experts and a community that is very active!!!!

If you run into any problems, I’m available to consult (at very reasonable fixed fees). Advice will always be free, but consulting is what I charge for.

I can even set up a pre-configured firewall for you and ship it out to you or I can come on location to do the job.  (Your preference), but telephone advice will always be free.. Just contact me via my contact page on this blog with your information and I’ll be in touch with you very quickly.

So let’s get down to the nitty gritty.  You can read about pfsense at the following link: http://pfsense.org

I recommend using an old PC you have laying around if you’re a small business. You can always use a netgate pre-configured appliance, but it won’t handle the p2p traffic or the throughput you’re really looking for unless it’s for an external employee, although, it would still be cheaper to put in a refurbished PC and you’ll get more power and throughput.

If you don’t have an old PC laying around, I recommend the following (please use these links as they actually provide me with a small commission).  Buy a used Dell PC  (refurbished) and add a couple of cheap Ethernet Cards.  You only need two for a simple setup, although you can add as many as you want. I use Intel Based chipset ethernet cards, because they lower the CPU utilization on the machine and perform the best.

Download the pfsense distribution iso and burn it to a CD.  The installation is self guided and will allow completely automate the installation for you.  Just remember to install it on the hard drive *anything with 20 GB or more is plenty*.  Then it’s just a matter of configuring the options you want and it just “works”.

I will be writing a how-to on rules and setting up pfsense properly for a variety of situations, but if you have something special, please feel free to drop me a line and I’d be more than happy to entertain writing a blog post about how to do it.

1. Create a Will. Don’t assume your spouse or children will get everything when you die. This is definitely NOT the case. Make sure you do this ASAP. The state gets your belongings and your surviving family will have a hell of a time trying to get it sorted out. Just get it out of the way for them.
2. Create a Living Trust. Don’t assume that you your children will be taken care of. This is NOT the case. You can also explicitly list whether you want to be on life-support and live as your favorite vegetable or go see whatever higher being or plane of existence there is.
3. Buy life insurance. Take care of those you love when you’re no longer around. Make the trust the beneficiary and you won’t have bickering relatives to deal with.

There are two ways to do this.

1. Get a lawyer.
2. Do it yourself.

If you’re like me, you want to know when and where your children are.. (face it.. they like to lie). The most important thing is to see not only where they are, but whether or not they are in a dangerous situation. During the first 3 hours after an abduction, the chances of recovery are high, but after that, it becomes a very sad ordeal. Our system actually determines whether an abduction happens or is going on based on our proprietary and patented algorithms. You’re notified immediately.

You have the option of being part of a volunteer network that will help to recover the child or family member. I don’t know if it’s important to you, but to me, it’s very important. My little girl is my world.

So to make a long story short, while this blog provides information on various technical issues, it is one of those few things that matter to me in life. My family.

I urge you to try it out. Tell your friends about it and most importantly, give it a chance. I promise you won’t be sorry. It’s already notified me of 2 hospitalization events in the last year.

Give it a shot… and most importantly, it’s free. While it’s still called, “beta”, the reality is we’ve tested this for 1.5 years and fixed most of the problems we’ve come across.

Help us do some good in the world and save some lives.. why? Because it matters. Excuse the ugly-ass sign up form, we’re in the process of making it more “purty”. Check it out at http://myfamilyguard.com. Interestingly enough, if you have a family member with Alzheimer’s, it works equally well by simply signing up the Alzheimer’s ridden family member as a child.

Cheers.

Percy (yes.. I’ve finally divulged my name)

So here’s the quick and simple solution.

create the following file in yum.repos.d:         CentOS-Testing.repo

inside that file, just paste the following:

[c5-testing]
name=CentOS-5 Testing
baseurl=http://dev.centos.org/centos/$releasever/testing/$basearch/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://dev.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-testing
priority=5

Now, just save the file.

as root, issue the following command:

yum –disablerepo=* –enablerepo=c5-testing update php*

EDIT:  That’s 2 dashes before disablerepo and enablerepo!!!

That should do it!  You’ll now have updated your php and it’s components to php-5.2.x

Hope that helps!

The following assumes that the pbx is out there on the internet side of the firewall and you have phones in your location behind the firewall.

I bought a used dell computer to use as my pfsense firewall and just added two ethernet cards and disabled the onboard nic (always a good idea).  Works like a charm.  Total Cost? $60.00  Buy them used and it will save you plenty of money.  Intel Chipset Ethernet cards work best with pfsense and take the load off the CPU (not like it matters, but it helps a bit).

1. Go to Package Manager and install siproxd. This should be straight forward and should work quite well.
2. In Siproxd, configure as follows:

3. Go to your firewall Nat Settings (Firewall / NAT / Outbound) and turn on Manual Outbound Nat and specify the following rule (Just the second one in the list)

Configuring siproxd on pfsense

4. **VERY IMPORTANT** – Reload your firewall rules. (status / filter reload)

5. The most important part to make it all work is simply to reset the state table on your router.  People will tell you to reboot the router, you can do that, but resetting the state table will have the same effect.  (Diagnostic / States / Reset States)

6. After you do this, you will lose access to your pfsense box.  Just log back in.

7. If your phones are configured properly, they’ll all connect to the server without issues. Configure the phones to contact and register to the server directly, not the proxy.

If this posting has helped you, please comment.  It’s important to me to know that I’m not doing this in vain.

Cheers and Happy Voiping!

Update: Enclosed is a set of screenshots for PFSense 2.0, and SPA2102, I’ve included a set of screenshots to help you configure the SPA and T.38 behind the pfsense.  This should help immensely.

[Show as slideshow]

EDIT:  *** Very important on PFsense 2.0.  Check your siproxd registered phones tab and make sure all of your phones / atas are registered there.  Occasionally, they’ll just disappear, unfortunately, the only way to solve it is to reboot the pfsense box followed by the devices.  Hopefully, the wonderful people at pfsense can fix this problem.***