Internet Occasionally Drops for No Apparent Reason
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Sometimes you find that two specific NIC chips will either not negotiate a link correctly or are unstable when linked. It shouldn't happen because both sides should meet the specs for Gigabit Ethernet but it can.
Putting a switch in between means that both the igb NIC and the modem are linked to the switch not to each other so at the lowest level the link negotiation/stability is different.What NICs do you have in the firewall? If you have something that isn't igb you could try using that as WAN.
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@stephenw10 Cheers for the explanation. Currently there are two 4 port NICs (both the same model) in the PC. There is another port eth0 on the motherboard, which is unused except for diagnostics etc, so I could try that one.
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Any idea what NIC that uses? eth is not a FreeBSD driver.
But just re-assigning the WAN to one of the other igb NICs would be a good test.
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@stephenw10 Not sure what NIC it uses, I will go and see if I can find out. It is on DELL Optiple 5050 SFF so should be able to determine it
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If it's recognised by pfSense you should be able to see it as an available interface.
If not it should be in the output of
pciconf -lv. -
@stephenw10 It is recognised by pfsense
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Ok, so what does pfSense recognise it as? I'm not sure what type of NICs are in that device.
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@stephenw10 It shows as :-
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I have been experiencing a similar issue despite mine doesn't drop but the Internet surfering becomes slow almost to a crawl and the logs only shows Dpinger sent to error 50. It usually happens between 1:30am - 3am, I guess the ISP updating firmware or changing IP...sometimes Dpinger doesn't recover and I need to restart the service...sometimes a reboot to recover speed. So, it's the ISP in my case.
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Ok great so it's an em(4) NIC. I would certainly test using that as WAN and see if anything changes.
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@stephenw10 will do
