@muppet:
I would check with your ISP and see if they have hard-set your port to 100/Full
Maybe the pfSense is trying auto and, seeing nothing, not bringing up the port.
And the switch, not seeing auto frame either, might be defaulting to 100M half-duplex, thus causing all the frame drops/problems.
This really sounds like an Ethrnet problem, nothing to do with pfsense itself.
PfSense works just fine, so it's not the problem. The problem will be your Ethernet card, the drivers or similar.
Try and do some diagnosis to see what speed and duplex the port is coming up at, especially when connected to your laptop (is auto-neg being used or not?)
Thank you!
It really was something wrong with ISP's port. It was set to auto, but still didn't work correctly, so my connection was regularly jumping through different modes-speeds and getting big error rate. They just changed the port, and now everyhing is perfect.
They would never do anything if I said them it's pfSense or any incompatible router, but they couldn't reject the issue with just switch.
@stephenw10:
At layer 3, yes (probably). At layer 2, maybe. At layer 1, nope.
The reason it's a good test to put an unmanaged switch between your WAN interface and modem is because it can show up issues exactly like this.
If your modem is set to 100Mb full duplex rather than auto the switch will likely connect to that fine and will also connect to the WAN interface that is set top auto negotiation fine. But without it you get a default connection which is often 10Mb half duplex, horrible speeds and huge error rate.
Ethernet hardware should all conform to the specs and be compatible but that is not 100% true. Some cards will refuse to establish a link or continually flap up and down for no good reason. I have a Realtek card here that behaves exactly like that but only when connected to one switch I have. ::)
What is the NIC in the Win7 PC?
Can you see the link speed/duplex on the switch in each of these cases?
Steve
Thanks for the info. Yes, they seem to implement things a bit differently. My Realtek NIC refused to see that broken connection at all, while Broadcom's one somehow worked fine on that… Also that Realtek only accepts it's hw mac, while Broadcom don't care.