@jimp I gave up, the download speed was around 2Mbps with TOE enabled.

Thanks SteveITS and Dobby_. It appears to be an ISP issue. I plugged my laptop in and was only getting 300 Mbps. Guess I should have really tried the basic stuff first. Thank you for your time and assistance!

For the system (OS) FreeBSD it comes from the FreeBSD team fixes and updates or upgrades For the pfSense itself there will be more options; pfSense-upgrade or option (13) in console pkg update or upgrade for the entire pkg`s such snort, suricata,.... Patch system inside of pfSense Recommended or custom patches option Package maintainers can fix something Available over the pkg system (updates) What more is needed or flat Who is offering more options? Or otherwise wich options are beloved to see or have here on top? pfSense 23.05 release (latest) [image: 1684961344700-123-23.05-release-vuln.latest.jpg] pfSense 2.7 Devel (latest) [image: 1684961379053-123-2.7-devel-vuln.latest.jpg] You see in 2.6 CE much patches are available and also recommended, but in 2.7 not anymore, because they are fleeting in that code of the new 2.7 CE version. In 23.05 Release where things also solved out and during the installation it was also updating / upgrading the squid & SquidGuard package I was reading something about, automatically! And by side it is not really a point to find a vuln. anywhere inside, it must be also able to use in the used or installed software and does then also affect things or functions where it can be used. This is not even present and able to use for others and the software. For sure it may be also a thing how things will be implemented, but if I personally trust not the coder of my firewall software, who should I trust then? And this is the other point on the other end of the line.

If you followed all those tests and checked everything is asked you to check, something must not have matched up along the way. Something had to be missing or different vs the expected behavior.

I added a System Tunable via the GUI via System/Advanced/System Tunables/Edit Edit Tunable Tunable: net.isr.dispatch Value: deferred Description: PPPoE single core tuning [default value=direct] Although I resorted to the CLI just to check the setting had changed: [23.05-RELEASE][admin@Router-8.*******.me]/root: sysctl net.isr.dispatch net.isr.dispatch: deferred [23.05-RELEASE][admin@Router-8.*******.me]/root: I'll monitor the cpu load and any impact elsewhere. ️

Hmm, well that still sounds like a Windows problem. Nothing pfSense can do about that. I do recall some discussion of running the OpenVPN client as a service so it's connected before login. That should be here on the forum somewhere. Edit: https://forum.netgate.com/post/969315

@keyser the authenticator application is called authelia. All incoming traffic passes through PfSense then the majority goes to my NAS that runs several applets. One of them is traefik which acts as the networks proxy server. All apps are resolved internally via PfSense (so, when internally I go to audiobooks.mywebsite.org it doesn't leave the network. Anyway, that's separate from this. A captive portal is just a webpage that requires authentication of some kind to proceed to connection. I'm just creating an airlock system in my network that also notifies me of new connections. It's essentially nothing fancier than what is effectively 2 captive portals wherein you can't reach the second without passing through the first. All of this was pretty well explained above. And repeatedly.

@stephenw10 Guess I need to prove it - assuming I get a few more days without incident, there are some settings to disable EEE which I'll try with the old wiring setup and see if that's stable. Problem is that I've had many months of stability in the past - so unless it shows an incident pretty quick I may not know. FYI - seems that this site may describe the innards of the ONTs - it's in a BT Openreach branded box but otherwise all the lights and sockets match. Nokia ONT chipsets Paul

@viragomann You were right my friend, thank you thank you thank you. I was nearing giving up on this project lol. Was about to plug the broken router back in for now. My OpenVPN config was 'tap' mode, which mainly was because of the previous system requiring me to use it. I didnt think it would cause to much problems but behind the scenes what needed to happen was not happening. I had no gateway interface being configured (thats why i had added one a couple times for testing). I've set it to a /30 and 'tun' mode and it seems to be working without further input now.

@jimp Thanks! Will make a note of that :)

Resolved issue in Sunny Valley Forum. Now back under control, and have new script to see how large these files are in compressed and uncompressed size find . -type f -iname "*all.sqlite" -exec sh -c "echo -n ' de-compressed: '; du -Ah '{}'; echo -n 'compressed (used): '; du -h '{}'; echo ' '" \; de-compressed: 44K ./usr/local/datastore/sqlite/alert_all.sqlite compressed (used): 4.5K ./usr/local/datastore/sqlite/alert_all.sqlite de-compressed: 8.0K ./usr/local/datastore/sqlite/sip_all.sqlite compressed (used): 4.5K ./usr/local/datastore/sqlite/sip_all.sqlite de-compressed: 73M ./usr/local/datastore/sqlite/tls_all.sqlite compressed (used): 30M ./usr/local/datastore/sqlite/tls_all.sqlite de-compressed: 443M ./usr/local/datastore/sqlite/conn_all.sqlite compressed (used): 187M ./usr/local/datastore/sqlite/conn_all.sqlite de-compressed: 184M ./usr/local/datastore/sqlite/dns_all.sqlite compressed (used): 78M ./usr/local/datastore/sqlite/dns_all.sqlite de-compressed: 58M ./usr/local/datastore/sqlite/http_all.sqlite compressed (used): 12M ./usr/local/datastore/sqlite/http_all.sqlite

@stephenw10 Yep, that’s what my testing shows.

@ali_jobia I take it you looked at this: https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/packages/cache-proxy/squidguard.html and this: https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/captiveportal/index.html https://forum.netgate.com/topic/83082/pfsense-squid-squidguard-for-captive-portal-with-ldap-auth-title-edited Then see whether this applies to you case: https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/10749

@jimp Ok thx to everyone. Decided not to go via VPN route. Worst case will use TOR

@rcoleman-netgate said in Identical Netgate Device ID and Activation Key: Running the SAME NDI on two different systems may be a violation of the terms of service -- but I'm not a lawyer and not an expert on the license terms, either. Thank you for your clarification. This was also what my question was about besides the technical aspects.