While expensive and hard to find on eBay (thanks, ServeTheHome), the HP t740 “Thin Client” is a great pfSense box if you want more power, or a compact home server.

While I could get away with a t730 or t620 Plus, but I have CenturyLink Fiber and PPPoE is more computationally intensive versus pure DHCP. That running a Tor relay, so I’d like some headroom and upgrade path to 10 Gigabits. [1].

PS/2 Freezes

While the t740 is a neat box, if you plan to run FreeBSD or its derivatives like pfSense, OPNsense, or HardenedBSD on the bare metal (as opposed to inside ESXi or Proxmox), an out of the box configuration freezes at boot on:

atkbd0: [GIANT-LOCKED]

To solve the issue, at the boot prompt, hit ESC, and the enter:

unset hint.uart.0.at
unset hint.uart.1.at

Note: You need to unset both, otherwise it will lock up at boot.

After you install, but before rebooting, open a post-installation shell, and run:

vi /boot/loader.conf.local

Add these two lines:

hint.uart.0.disabled="1"
hint.uart.1.disabled="1"

This will fix the issue across reboots and firmware upgrades on pfSense/OPNsense. Thanks, Ed Gonzales for reporting my old “solution” didn’t work across firmware upgrades. That explained why my OPNsense box suddenly stopped working after an upgrade (New section, Septemper 11, 2022).

I have run pfSense CE 2.5.2 and am currently running OPNsense 22.1 on my t740 without issues after doing the steps above.

SSD

If you are using the HP M.2 eMMC, it is not detected on an out-of-the-box FreeBSD installation. In that case, you will need a third-party M.2 SSD. I’m using a Samsung 970 EVO 250GB [2], but any M.2 can do, SATA or NVMe.

[1] - Plus after cloning my ONT, I got rid of the connection limit issue.

[2] - I normally buy off-brand “budget” SSDs (don’t ask me why), but Best Buy shipped faster than Amazon when I needed the SSD. The 970 EVO is what was in stock.