My Box has 3 interfaces but they are all in use. I have LAN, WAN1 and WAN2 because the pfsense uses 2 DSL lines.

Sorry - i just realized on my drive in to work what the problem is. The router's default egress path is going through a vpn and that is what is causing the problem.  NTP is working :)

No, it does not have any similar "features". Do yourself a big favour and limit your pfSense efforts to Ethernet. If you want wireless, get a proper HW, not a PCI card. After that, you can either load balance or failover your multiWAN setup. "Single fat wireless data pipe" -> utter BS.

Haven't tried that! Going to try and get the auto update from 2.0.1 to 2.2.2 over the bank holiday weekend (having taken clone disk images and a backup first so I can revert it if I need to!).

FYI, same issue in 2.2.2-RELEASE (amd64). Any suggestions? Thanks!

Its great that you use the most recent version but no I am not saying that NAT isnt working anymore. Clearly from my description the SMTP server is responding to the incoming connection request its just that I am not receiving the banner on the external connection as I do from the internal.

Ah, interesting. Slightly odd that you couldn't use any of the virtual ips to history the vpn service though. That's how it's usually done. You may have been able to do so by adding the 'router ip' as a virtual IP leaving the wan free to talk to the modem (if you get an unlocked one). Steve

Where power cycling a switch fixes a problem, it's likely a general network problem like an IP conflict on the gateway IP. Before changing NICs, reinstalling things, etc. troubleshoot what's causing the actual problem. Can you ping the LAN IP? Get to the web When you try to reach the LAN IP when things aren't working, what MAC do you end up with in your ARP cache? Any "X is using my IP …" messages in the system log?

How is your outbound NAT configured? Firewall>NAT, Outbound.

Shut down your outbound ports and see how much you upload to peers that listen all kinds of random ports.

@jimmy_1969: During package installation the install log is shown in the GUI. But sometimes the package installation fails and the GUI log is no longer updated, nor showing any error message. Not sure if this is helpful or not … but I ran into similar problems installing Snort and other packages. Sometimes it worked but other times the installation would just stop and no errors in the GUI log. :'( For me it turned out to be a problem using Window 8.1 and Firefox 37. Once I moved back to XP and Firefox 37 then the GUI would finish the install every time without error. ;D

That is almost always caused by packages and then mostly by Squid or Squidguard but Sarg is also good at that. What packages are you running? Steve

Ok, after so much fiddling I figured out the issue. It was the MTU but not the MTU of the server, it was the MTU of the client.

Yeah. Uninstall obvious junk like squid before upgrading next time.