Maybe your hard disk is crapping out.

The easiest place to check it is at the boot POST screen. It may be possible to read it with some utility from the pfSense command line, I haven't tried that. Any utilities I did use were under 8.1. You can read it from FreeDOS with the biosid command but that's less convenient. Steve

We are thinking how to accomplish this that is a good tip thanks Gertjan. Not really sure how was it lost or how you assume to get more/better answers when you start a duplicate thread every couple of days. Stop abusing pfSense firewall as a generic webserver. Sir, u don't even know what we are doing but u already again stop trying people to build a more rich firewall, we are not using pfsense as web server don't know where u get this info, we just want to connect to a external mysql server using php, we are building a app that  is related to captiveportal, php-mysql is a old driver, the new one php-mysqli is the new and has better new functions that we use. The firewall is very well check and rules to let just pass what we need no more. The other thread was related to install php-mysqli, this is related to how to add php-mysqli to the base system. But well thanks doktornotor for your advised.

Touch updates the modification time on a file. If the file doesn't exist, it creates an empty one. Copying loader.conf to loader.conf.local and then editing was an as good or better approach. @Phishfry: I will have to read up on "touch" -First i have heard of it…

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