Scp & rsync traffic randomly stalling

DaveQB

I am on.

2.0-BETA5 (i386)
built on Wed Feb 23 15:42:56 EST 2011

I will do some more isloation testing this weekend, see if my particular issue doesn't lie somewhere else.

It does seem firewall though.

I will report back.

DaveQB

Just another question. How best can one trouble shoot such and issue on the pfsense box?

Thanks.

jimp

you could run a really large packet capture and hope to catch something, but otherwise all you can really do is periodically check any error counters to see if things increase.

Ultimately you'd probably need the packet captures to have any hope of figuring out what is causing the connection to stall.

DaveQB

Thanks Jimp

I'll try that and also isolating the modem etc on the weekend. I really need to get to the bottom of this.

DaveQB

This is my WAN interface card. Could this be it? As outbound works, but a steady stream at max upload speed is what ends up stalling and basically "crashing"

rl0@pci0:9:0: class=0x020000 card=0x13011186 chip=0x13001186 rev=0x10 hdr=0x00
vendor = 'D-Link System Inc'
device = 'DL 10038C or 10038D (Remark of Realtek RTL-8139) Fast Ethernet Adapter'
class = network
subclass = ethernet

jimp

It's certainly possible, those rl chips are not known for their quality.

DaveQB

Thanks Jimp

I think it makes more sense given the symptoms…maybe. I am not a networking expert though.
Recap, outbound traffic works in bursts, but a continuous flow of outbound traffic halts/stalls/crashes at about the ~3MB mark.

I don't see any errors or lost packets.

I tried running with a 760 MTU. No difference.

Running in bridge mode with a TP-Link 8840T ADSL2+ modem.

DaveQB

Ok I think I should start a new thread, but what forum? 2.0 specific or not?

So I just ssh'd into the pfsense box itself, got up a shell and scp a 10MB file to an external host.

As it is was doing on a PC on the network, it got to around 3.6-3.7MB and stalls forcing me to close the terminal and re-login again.

So I tried this:

scp -l 100 10mb external.domain:

And this completed successfully. Albeit slow, but all done.

So the issue is more specifically, uplink saturation causing a dropout/stall.
Max upload is about 900KB/s and download is 1.11MB/s.

Downloading at full speed is no issue though, so the card can support speeds much greater then a fully saturated upload link.

I will be testing tomorrow many tests including pull the pfsense box entirely out of the equation.

This is a new house, new cables, new net connection, so anything is possible.

Thanks for reading.

DaveQB

So I changed the modem from bridge modem to PPPoE and then changed the pfsense boxs WAN interface from PPPoE to DHCP client.

No more issues with uploading/outbound etc.
So it is not the interface (Realtek) or anything hardware related. It is either the modem in Bridge or the pfsense box in PPPoE where the issue lies.

Another note is I had the WAN on MTU 760. Had tremendous issue when I first put it in this configuration for all LAN clients. I reset the MTU to blank but still issue. Check with ifconfig on the pfsense box in a shell and MTU was still 760. A reboot of pfsense resolved this issue, resetting MTU to 1500.

jimp

One of my WANs is PPPoE and I run quite a bit of scp over it. Granted the upload on that circuit is only ~0.5Mbit so it probably isn't stressing anything anywhere.

DaveQB

Did a bunch of tests on the weekend. Issue is with the pfsense box.

I started a new topic on this, felt bad hijacking this guys thread.

http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,33709.0.html

Aderium

I am having the same trouble with scp/rsync but only when rsync between two pfsense box via IPSEC. When I run the rsync from to WAN it works just fine, when I run rsync via IPSEC it stalls.

PFSENSE 1.2.3