The RAM I mentioned in the last post arrived. Surprisingly, it didn't sit around the house for months. Instead, I installed it within 30 minutes of receipt and had the network back up and running in about 20 minutes after restarting a few switches and APs.

This doubles the machine's memory from four sticks of 512MB 533MHz (2GB) to two sticks of 2GB 800MHz (4GB) for about $16. There was a slight CPU spike (100% load for about ten seconds) upon pfSense starting up, but it quickly stabilized and has been running smoothly for hours. I'm hoping this is just a startup artifact, but if time permits I'll see what I can find in the logs.

8GB seems overkill for this project, so while I initially intended to fill the now open RAM slots, I'm going to see how things run and only add more RAM if necessary. 

Prior to shutting down for RAM installation, the system had been online and running smoothly for 8 days. This has got me thinking about the status of various critical components (mostly things with capacitors, like power supplies, MOBO). I suppose I'll cross that bridge when necessary, but I'd at least like to think about it so I'm not caught off guard. Maybe harvest cheap/free  PSUs in the meantime.

I'm going to review project logs, take some notes, and hopefully wrap this project up in the next post or two. Thanks for following along so far.