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    Can someone help me troubleshoot this simple setup?

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
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    • ?
      Guest
      last edited by

      @stephenw10:

      Which interfaces are you using with which NICs?
      I have faced lockup problems with Marvell Yukon NICs though that was using the msk driver not the sk driver.
      It was only a problem when the NIC/driver was under high load, when testing throughput. If I limited the speed to 100Mbps by inserting an old switch it was rock solid.
      This is pure speculation at this point.  ::)

      Steve

      It does seem to happen more frequently when I have 4 games going on my pc at once and downloading bit torrents, doing speed tests. Pretty much anything that would soak up all the bandwidth possible.

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      • stephenw10S
        stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
        last edited by

        I would guess that you are suffering from the LAN interface freezing. When you hook up a console or try to log in from the WAN side you will find out.
        It's interesting that you are only getting 100Mbps connection to your sk0 interface. Faulty cable? Fussy switch? Exactly which chip does the d-link NIC use?

        You haven't said what speed your WAN connections are but I'm guessing they are probably less than 100Mbps in which case you may be better of using the sk0 interface as one of your WAN connections instead.

        Steve

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        • ?
          Guest
          last edited by

          @stephenw10:

          I would guess that you are suffering from the LAN interface freezing. When you hook up a console or try to log in from the WAN side you will find out.
          It's interesting that you are only getting 100Mbps connection to your sk0 interface. Faulty cable? Fussy switch? Exactly which chip does the d-link NIC use?

          You haven't said what speed your WAN connections are but I'm guessing they are probably less than 100Mbps in which case you may be better of using the sk0 interface as one of your WAN connections instead.

          Steve

          I'm 10d/3u on cable and 8d/1u on dsl. It's did the problem a couple times today and all I have to do is unplug the LAN cat5 cable from the pfsense and plug it back in and it works again. I've been too addicted to skyrim today to actually try and troubleshoot it haha. =\ Today is my vacation..

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          • ?
            Guest
            last edited by

            I just switched the LAN interface to sis0 and put the centurylink connection on the sk0. We will see how it performs today. :) Wish me luck!

            If it is a driver issue, how do I switch the driver and which one will work ?

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            • stephenw10S
              stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
              last edited by

              You can't just switch the driver, the sk driver is the correct one for your card. However it may have been updated since FreeBSD 8.1 was released which is what pfSense 2.0 is based on. You may be able to recompile a newer driver with bug fixes. However that driver has been fairly stable for while, I've been using it no problems with Marvel 88E8001 based NICs.

              There are some tuning options you can try with the driver.

              Steve

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              • ?
                Guest
                last edited by

                @stephenw10:

                You can't just switch the driver, the sk driver is the correct one for your card. However it may have been updated since FreeBSD 8.1 was released which is what pfSense 2.0 is based on. You may be able to recompile a newer driver with bug fixes. However that driver has been fairly stable for while, I've been using it no problems with Marvel 88E8001 based NICs.

                There are some tuning options you can try with the driver.

                Steve

                can you elaborate on the tuning options?

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                • ?
                  Guest
                  last edited by

                  after switching LAN to the other adapter I have not been disconnected once yet :) Going on a good 12+ hours so far.

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                  • stephenw10S
                    stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                    last edited by

                    So it probably was the NIC locking in some way. Presumably you are using the Marvel (sk) NIC for one of your WAN interfaces, are you checking that that hasn't locked?
                    In my testing the msk driver would usually show a 'watchdog timeout' in the system logs when it locked.

                    Steve

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                    • ?
                      Guest
                      last edited by

                      Actually the connection I've had connected to that interface has been going up and down non-stop all the time, its been down 90% of the time. WTF. I'm going to try the 2nd marvell adapter I have in this thing. I have 2 of them totaling 4 nics. I just never mentioned the 4th since its not being used for anything.

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                      • stephenw10S
                        stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                        last edited by

                        Hmm,
                        Well the fact that it has been going up and down, whilst not good, does indicate that if it's a problem with the NIC or driver it is at least able to recover. My own experiences were that a locked card will never recover until the interface it brought down and back up.
                        Do you have any idea if that WAN connection was stable before? It's Sunday do perhaps your ISP are doing maintenance?
                        Can you see which Marvel IC is on that card?

                        Steve

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                        • ?
                          Guest
                          last edited by

                          Just wanted to finalize this thread out by saying I ended up swapping out both the nics. Their chipset numbers are: 88E8001-LKJ1 AJ476A.2 0714 A4P TW Marvell of some kind. Hardware version: B2

                          Now everything works fine except dealing with havp and squid now :)

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