Touch wood I think I have found my issue. It was the old RealTek network card driver in pfsense 2.6. Here a my basic notes on how to update
Realtek Drivers
Enable BSD repo /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/pfSense.conf and changing the first line to:
FreeBSD: { enabled: yes }
Next, edit /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf and make the same change there:
FreeBSD: { enabled: yes }
It must be enabled in both places to function.
Install new driver You can just use pkg add directly
pkg update
pkg add https://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:12:amd64/latest/All/realtek-re-kmod-198.00.pkg
Edit /boot/loader.conf.local to load new driver. You can append those lines with echo
echo 'if_re_load="YES"' >> /boot/loader.conf.local
echo 'if_re_name="/boot/modules/if_re.ko"' >> /boot/loader.conf.local