Pfsense constantly dropping WAN
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Hello
I am currently running pfsense off of an HP T730 thinclient with an Intell Pro/1000 82571EB 2 port ethernet card.
When I first installed pfsense, I used the intel card for both WAN and LAN. After about 5 minutes of pfsense running, the card would just shut off completely. There would be no LED status lights at all on the card, no internet available, no logs showing why it happened. I tried various power management settings in bios to try to fix this, which nothing helped. Just rebooting pfsense would not solve the power problem for the nic, I would have to pull the power cable out for about 5 minutes, and in some cases even remove and reseat the nic back into the pice slot for it to regain power and have status LEDs again.
I then put WAN on the built in Realtek 8168, and plugged LAN into the Intel card. All seemed fine for about a week.
Now that I thought there were no more issues, I started tweaking pfsense, setting firewall rules, installing packages, etc.
Every single time I change a setting and save, pfsense drops WAN within 2 minutes of a config save, then 30 seconds later LAN goes down. I'm unable to SSH into pfsense, and using a monitor and keyboard the console is locked up. I can only do a force shutdown to restart the server and get internet running again.
If I don't restore my settings from before I made the change, pfsense will drop WAN and LAN within 10 minutes of being booted, making me do a force shutdown again to get internet back up.
If I don't touch any settings or install any packages, it works great...but I've got a couple consoles running NAT3 and a couple torrent clients needing port forwarding.
I then found that this issue also happens when I run a rclone command on my unraid server. Using 90%+ download bandwidth also crashes the pfsense system.
I have heard realtek cards don't play nicely with pfsense, so that may be a cause of my second problem. But what would cause the intel nic to lose power like that?
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hello @xMrMurderx,
I have read that sometimes, Intel NICs can run very hot. Depending on the case design and the air flow, I have read that the NIC can sometime "throttle" off to save itself. My 10Gbps Intel NIC does run very hot and required quite a bit of air flow to be happy.
Just a thought. -
Did a bit of googling, installed the realtek re-kmod drivers and made sure they were running. It still gives me the same issue.
@LarrySchapker said in Pfsense constantly dropping WAN:
hello @xMrMurderx,
I have read that sometimes, Intel NICs can run very hot. Depending on the case design and the air flow, I have read that the NIC can sometime "throttle" off to save itself. My 10Gbps Intel NIC does run very hot and required quite a bit of air flow to be happy.
Just a thought.Thanks, I just plugged WAN back into the Intel. Gonna do some testing and see if it is an overheating issue.
edit
Right after posting this pfsense went down again. This time both WAN and LAN were on the intel card. The card still had the LEDs on so it did not lose power like it did before. Now I'm completely stumped, I honestly thought my main issue was the built in realtek..
edit2
Read more on the T730. I guess there's an incompatibility between Intel chips and AMD processors which cause the PC to freeze up. I had a spare realtek 8111, swapped out the cards and now everything works as it should. The realtek re-kmod drivers are loaded, and I'm able to change configs and save no problem.
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@xMrMurderx said in Pfsense constantly dropping WAN:
pfsense drops WAN within 2 minutes of a config save, then 30 seconds later LAN goes down. I'm unable to SSH into pfsense, and using a monitor and keyboard the console is locked up
If the console stops responding that implies some more serious issue. Does it even respond to
ctl+t? That can sometimes show something when nothing else does?Or does the caps-lock key/led work on a directly connected keyboard?
After you reboot do you see anything logged?
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@stephenw10 said in Pfsense constantly dropping WAN:
@xMrMurderx said in Pfsense constantly dropping WAN:
pfsense drops WAN within 2 minutes of a config save, then 30 seconds later LAN goes down. I'm unable to SSH into pfsense, and using a monitor and keyboard the console is locked up
If the console stops responding that implies some more serious issue. Does it even respond to
ctl+t? That can sometimes show something when nothing else does?Or does the caps-lock key/led work on a directly connected keyboard?
After you reboot do you see anything logged?
Ctrl+t did nothing. Num, caps lock etc lights turn on and off when I hit them, but yeah the console is completely frozen.
This guy has the exact same setup with the same intel nic, same problem as me. There's a few other reddit and forum threads about this specific PC build with intel cards giving the same issues. I just wish I did a little more research before buying the card haha. It's been a little over a month of running stock pfsense because of this issue.
But yeah, problem has been resolved. Threw in a different card I had lying around and everything has fixed itself.
