I'll just answer to myself: after 5h the problem came back, so i disabled hardware checksum offloading and the system have been stable for 20h, wich is promising, i'll just wait and see.

Is there something new here? I have an ASUS P9D-I, Socket-1150 with 2x Intel I210AT onboard and i like to use this insted of buy a intel dual card nic. Thanks!

I wouldn't bet on it being in a 2.1.1

Thank you very much for your reply, I just ordered one  ;D

@SixXxShooTeR: Any UPS you recommend for home use? I use these, plus the remote monitoring cards.  I like them because of the Sine Wave output. http://www.apc.com/products/resource/include/techspec_index.cfm?base_sku=SMT1500 If you're looking for something cheaper then APC's Back-UPS Pro line is nice.

Ok, the 7.3.8 driver looks like it does still support the 82546GB. I had forgotten that the driver was divided into two some time ago (in 2011?), the legacy em driver code still lists it. So maybe just adding the PCI device ID to the current driver would allow it to run without the by-pass hardware. Steve

Further… I enabled powerd and "minimum" mode, and my CPU speed dropped from 2GHz to 125Mhz!  CPU use with a single Netflix stream went to 100%, then 27%.... This is interesting.  My temps are 12C lower already, and it will be interesting to see if network traffic (Netflix) is effected as the CPU scales. As long as the family doesn't lose its precious internet, I can run this system as slowly as possible. ETA temps went from 70-75 to 53-55C with no noticeable network performance hit.

Note that this is a PCI-X card, so it won't actually fit into modern PCIe-based mainboards.

Hmm. IPv6 issue perhaps? Doesn't ecplain why it's only broken on the X700. Some hardware off-loading not working with the Realtek NICs? Steve

@stephenw10: Reading some blog and forum posts, possibly that modem needs atd instead of atdt to dial. No idea how you'd change that but maybe you could test it from the command line. Steve Thanks, I did wonder if it was something like that. I'll try that from the PPP term.

@Raegis: Another thing I would like to ask is if pfsense supports the usage of modem cards and if yes if there are ones known to be working especially well? Since you're based in Europe, it should be easy to get hold of old/ cheap Thomson Speedtouch modems.  The ST516v6 or ST536v6 are compact (small) units that should work well.  You can even put them inside the computer chassis so they don't occupy more space.  Open up a PCI bracket and run the power, tel. & ethernet cable in.

A little more info on the subject, just in case this issue affects someone else in the future. There were two misconfigurations in the LAN that led to this: I had two DHCP servers on the same subnet assigning IPs from the same pool. I had one of the servers (192.168.1.7) with a dual NIC with Adaptive Load Balancing enabled BUT without a primary NIC selected for the team, which made it swap MACs between ports constantly. pfSense did not like this. Once the first issue was addressed the second issue kicked in and the log was flooded with the following (at a rate of about once per second). kernel: arp: 192.168.1.7 moved from a0:36:9f:07:70:61 to a0:36:9f:07:70:60 on em4 kernel: arp: 192.168.1.7 moved from a0:36:9f:07:70:60 to a0:36:9f:07:70:61 on em4

with regards to the watchdog timer, thread here but i cannot reply http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=43844.0 according to -> http://lwn.net/Articles/342308/ its a derivative of the IXP2000 linux driver

Thanks for the tipp. I made it working by manually patching it. Maybe this is something for the development team to consider to try out your trick…

Just uninstalled/reinstalled and it seems to be working. :-) Thanks, Steve

Ah, ok. Well if it's that old it may not been locked down. Might still be a suitable candidate for m0n0wall or OpenWRT (x86). Probably only as an interesting project though. Steve