@rschell Maybe of any help or just sharing my knowledge: I found that using command stress would give me best results when it comes to testing boost speeds. In combination with using cpuset for targeting specific cores (P-cores and/or E-cores).

Installing stress:

pkg install stress rehash

Command cpuset -l 0-3 stress -c 4 would (if hyper-threading is enabled) stress both P-cores with 4 worker processes.

@stephenw10

Good morning..

No pcaps, and logs are probably still on the system.

We've had to replace the system. We've changed network card after network card, and at best this has to be static electricity damage to the motherboard. On changing network cards, no matter how many times we applied the configuration, no dice. On reboot, it's back to square one. Put back in old network cards, no problem except now even though with hardware offloading off, by next day the network is crawling to a stop, so enough milling around, We're beating a dead horse at this point. Will be ordering Netgate replacement, but in meantime, we're running CE on VM. So, I'm not sure what kind of spike or transient got through, but now it appears two switches at other locations are affected as well.

If you need to actually route 25Gbps you have a much better chance of achieving that using TNSR. You'll notice how everyone on that other thread was surprised the OP there managed it using pfSense.

Yes, if you used VLANs over a single 25G link you would need to connect that to a 25G capable switch to separate it for hosts on each.

Steve

so yeah, problem with the ftdi etc adapters are, as they are not "as cheaply made" as the CH340's, the plugs are not easily disassembled, my serial side is just 2 plasic halves that i was able to easily disassemble to resolder some pins to diffrent ones (to make it compatible with the APC pinout without the need for any special adapter or cable, basically adding a USB port to my apc by directly plugging the serial adapter into it)
thats not possible to archive using higher quality adapters where the plug is sealed in some kind of rubber all around.

@osvaldompf Which hardware specifically is broken? Are you asking to take the storage device out of the dead one and add it to a new one? If so it might work but you might find it easier to build a new one, mount the old drive in it (will require some leg work on your own as it's not actually supported in software) and collecting the config.xml file from the old drive and importing it into the new one.

If the hardware is vastly different it is likely the system will either not boot at all or boot and be unstable.

@stephenw10

Thanks for the reply! I ordered a 2100… (250 is ok for us)

That looks normal. It's the interrupt rate that counts and none of those are very high. The total interrupts just increase with uptime/traffic.

Steve

The 1.5Gbps restriction here is not the NIC. If the advertisement values are set it will link at 2.5 or 5G and pass that if the system is capable. There are several other threads reporting success:
https://forum.netgate.com/topic/146913/nbase-t-support-for-intel-x550/

@stephenw10
I believe it could be yes. But resolved on my part. Thanks again for all the help!

Where does it appear to stop booting? Does it actually not boot or just stop writing to the console?

You could force it do that every time but it would delay boot significantly. Check the script used in /etc/rc.initial.reboot.

@stephenw10 perfect answer, thanks. Looking for grunt here…
G

@JustCuriose

Something popped up into my mind when I saw your post :
You didn't mention the 3 letter word that Microsoft now wants to be present : TPM. A physical chip on the motherboard.
Without it, there is no direct access to Windows 11.
Its all (among others) about protecting safe booting - and protecting the boot process.

Checkout Youtube and look for Lojax. I didn't found any in-depth articles (videos) but it's pretty nasty.
On the other hand : if a boot virus is present on your system, some one had to have access to your system, with root rights, and install it. IMHO, the moment they login, the system is already considered 'dead'

Yup, pfSense CE is x86 only and most SOHO routers are not. Did you have specific hardware in mind?

@keyser Thanks for explaining this. 🙏