Awesome .  thanks for the help.

http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/How_can_I_monitor_bandwidth_usage%3F

Squid+SquidGuard can and do impact network performance.  Disable these when conducting your tests.  You also did not indicate the kinds of NICS you are using.

Try the following, with cron: /etc/rc.conf_mount_rw && cd / && /usr/bin/tar -czf /cf/conf/rrd.tgz -C / var/db/rrd/*.rrd && /etc/rc.conf_mount_ro NOTE:  That's set up for the nano version, where the disk has to be remounted RW. Cheers.

This is what remote syslog is for.  Look into it.  Learn it.  Love it.

Thought i would leave this up here… After tonnes of testing it seems my 2-bit switch needs you to tell it full duplex......or it does 100 half max. Have used a old 4 port adsl modem as a switch and that is actually working better.

I depends how you have the PCs setup, how locked down they are. You can assign a fixed dhcp lease for each pc based on MAC so that they each always get the same IP address and then create access rules based on IP. However that's trivial to bypass if the computers are not locked down. If they aren't locked down then you can change the MAC anyway. I'm not sure if there's a filter based on cumulative access time. Steve Edit: Doesn't seem like this is in place yet. See: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,36435.msg187789.html#msg187789

Kind of what I suspected. I'll try getting hold of a better NIC before I start complaining to the ISP though, just to be sure. Thanks a lot for the help!

Tests on the other boxes could be a TCP tuning issue. What OS is running on the machines behind pfSense? Assuming it is Windows, if you are using Vista/7 you shouldn't need to do anything as it generally does a good job at dynamically adjusting it's settings as needed. XP and older though don't have the dynamically adjusted settings and can benefit from this: http://www.dslreports.com/tweaks and then this: http://www.dslreports.com/drtcp. I know that tool won't work for non-windows OSes but the tweak test is Java based and should run on any OS, of course making the adjustments it recommends would require a skillset I don't have :P

@dmg210: I will post another log with more information next time it drops. Do you mean run a traceroute when the WAN link goes down? No, I don't mean a traceroute because that won't get very far if the link is down. I meant packet capture, for example, pfsense shell command: # tcpdump -i vr0 (replace vr0 by the physical name of your WAN interface) to see what is happening when you expect your WAN link to be recovering.

MAN! USE THE PACKAGE RATE! HE IS PERFECT!!! Use in Status  >  Traffic graph PFSense is the best

Think I found the culprit…. I noticed that the number of processes was steadily increasing over time as well... Turned off NAT reflection, and things seem back to normal. The start of this problem also coincided with my use of Wuala (a great service) which requires UDP port forwards in the ~7000 range to work properly. Hope this helps someone else.  It's worth noting that I experienced the same problem on 2.0RC1 and 1.2.3RELEASE. -Matt

Is it something simple like your PPPoE connection timing out, and turning on keepalives will fix it?