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    Internet dies when a torrent is on.

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
    23 Posts 7 Posters 10.6k Views
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    • U
      unregistered00
      last edited by

      When the modem is directly connected to the modem, I'm getting normal torrent downloads. When I connect it to pfsense, I get the Internet stoppage.

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      • johnpozJ
        johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
        last edited by

        Sure its not just killing your dns forwarder?  I run torrents through my pfsense box all the time, and its sure not any sort of power box. Its an OLD p3 800Mhz, with 256KB of ram on a 6GB HDD – OLD!!!

        And I scream with multiple torrents all the time, I see like total 1.8MB down quite often, have my upload in utorrent client limited to 132KB about 1Mbit, since my upload after powerboost ends is only about 2Mbit

        I run unbound on my pfsense letting it do all the dns to roots.  Im currently running
        2.1-DEVELOPMENT (i386)
        built on Thu Jul 14 01:23:35 EDT 2011

        With a gitsync as of this morning.

        An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
        If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
        Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
        SG-4860 24.11 | Lab VMs 2.8, 24.11

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        • U
          unregistered00
          last edited by

          The DNS Forwarder is indeed on, almost all computers that are connected use Pfsense's assigned DNS.

          Is a DNS required? I landed in this place and the existing pfsense already has a DNS. All the computers are also connected to its DNS.

          We are using PFsense for an Internet cafe btw. The timer software that we're using doesn't even require a DNS to connect to the "server".

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          • johnpozJ
            johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
            last edited by

            Dns kind of required to to use the internet though huh ;)

            Heres the thing you forward to where for dns??  p2p can generate a SHIT LOAD of DNS, some little routers dns can not handle it.  And there you go no dns = no internet browsering.

            Simple test, when you running a torrent from some client, flush its local dns cache

            ipconfig /flushdns

            now try and ping some stuff, say www.google.com, other websites you like to go to, pfsense.org – do they resolve an IP in quickly?  Or does it say unknown host?

            example
            C:\Windows\System32>ipconfig /flushdns

            Windows IP Configuration

            Successfully flushed the DNS Resolver Cache.

            C:\Windows\System32>ping www.google.com

            Pinging www.l.google.com [[b]74.125.157.147] with 32 bytes of data:
            Reply from 74.125.157.147: bytes=32 time=34ms TTL=52
            Reply from 74.125.157.147: bytes=32 time=34ms TTL=52

            Ping statistics for 74.125.157.147:
                Packets: Sent = 2, Received = 2, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
            Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
                Minimum = 34ms, Maximum = 34ms, Average = 34ms
            Control-C
            ^C
            C:\Windows\System32>ping pfsense.org

            Pinging pfsense.org [[b]69.64.6.21] with 32 bytes of data:

            We are not so worried if they respond to the ping or not, but that they actually resolve to an IP (dns)

            An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
            If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
            Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
            SG-4860 24.11 | Lab VMs 2.8, 24.11

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            • U
              unregistered00
              last edited by

              So disabling the DNS is a no go. Are there any other solutions for this?

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              • C
                cmb
                last edited by

                There's no way you're killing your DNS forwarder, even if someone was intentionally throwing absurd numbers of queries to it on a slow system. The only time I've seen or heard of overloading the DNS forwarder is creating a recursive loop (i.e. set it to query another DNS server, and set that DNS server to query it, so every request loops infinitely) which is impossible to do in the typical setup where you're using an upstream DNS server.

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                • johnpozJ
                  johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
                  last edited by

                  Who said anything about disabling dns??  You mean its not the problem?

                  As to no way your killing the forwarder, that depends on what forwarder your using..  I would agree a real no, but for all we know they are pointing to a soho router in front of their pfsense box??

                  I have seen it be an issue quite often, you normally do not run or even allow p2p in a work setup, so where you normally see this issue is a home setup.  Many homes have crappy ass soho routers that have 2MB of ram total and small portion of that is used for their dns forwarder.  So yeah you can kill the dns services on a soho router pretty easy when you start doing hundreds if not 1000's of queries for PTRs, etc.

                  An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
                  If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
                  Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
                  SG-4860 24.11 | Lab VMs 2.8, 24.11

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                  • johnpozJ
                    johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
                    last edited by

                    Ok Im grabbing a big torrent right at the moment, not having any issues what so ever doing anything else on the web, maybe streaming video would be a pain since I pretty much have my download pipe maxed out.

                    But as you can see from the speed graph on the torrent, its freaking screaming at like 1.8MBps, but not really even touching this OLD P3 800, 256MB ram, etc.  Now it puts a bit of a hit on my latency for pinging my gateways, but thats about it.

                    Now you notice its got a few states going, but its not really over the top..  What are your states when your downloading?

                    So its not pfsense that has the problem, there is clearly something else as your problem.  Now you notice my upload there on the pfsense graph is a hair over 1Mbps – this is about half my upload pipe after speedboost stops, with a speedtest.net I show about 25Mbps down and 4Mbps up - but speedboost from comcast makes that look better than my real pipe is.

                    torrentsandpfsense.jpg
                    torrentsandpfsense.jpg_thumb
                    pfsensetorrents.jpg
                    pfsensetorrents.jpg_thumb

                    An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
                    If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
                    Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
                    SG-4860 24.11 | Lab VMs 2.8, 24.11

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                    • C
                      cmb
                      last edited by

                      @johnpoz:

                      As to no way your killing the forwarder, that depends on what forwarder your using..  I would agree a real no, but for all we know they are pointing to a soho router in front of their pfsense box??

                      That's very true, I was assuming a direct connection to the Internet with nothing else acting as a DNS forwarder when that's not known to be the case here.

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                      • C
                        cmb
                        last edited by

                        @johnpoz:

                        Now it puts a bit of a hit on my latency for pinging my gateways, but thats about it.

                        Which is induced by the ISP's limit on your connection, not the firewall, all your traffic will have increased latency when your pipe is full.

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                        • johnpozJ
                          johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
                          last edited by

                          Exactly, I expected that - just showing that its not pfsense not handling a torrent.

                          An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
                          If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
                          Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
                          SG-4860 24.11 | Lab VMs 2.8, 24.11

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