SisX: watchdog time expired on 2.0.3
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Well, it was something like that.
I have a pfSense 2.0.1 firewall I built a couple of years ago using a small form factor Dell Optiplex with a built-in Intel ethernet port and two Netgear FA311 cards. It worked perfectly until early this week when it started crashing due to swollen filter caps on the motherboard. After replacing the caps the system came back up fine but I was keeping an eye on it.
I happened to notice the comment "cannot check for upgrades" in the dashboard today so I poked around in System >> Firmware to allow it to check, it found 2.0.3 and installed it. After that, performance wasn't even dismal. Just selecting another pfSense menu option could take four or five minutes to display and only a tiny amount of traffic would pass.
On the console of the firewall I saw long lists of errors along the lines of
sis0: watchdog timeout exceeded
sis1: watchdog timeout exceededNo issues with em0. There seemed to be one "short cable fix applied" for each four or five of the above messages, divided between the two ports.
I resolved the issue by exporting my settings, burning a CD from the 2.0.1 ISO, and starting over.
Now everything is happy, it even tells me that there is an upgrade available to 2.0.3, but I'm a little leery of running that again.
Is there an issue with the newer version and my network cards? Is there a fix? Should I try to find the 2.0.2 upgrade? Should I try to upgrade from the console instead of from the web interface? Or should I just stay with 2.0.1 for the next few years and ignore it?
Van
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You could try a 2.1 RC snapshot.
Chances are either one of two things is happening:
1. The other changes on 2.0.3 are interacting poorly with that NIC
2. The other changes on 2.0.3 are driving that hardware a little harder and exposing some other electrical issueThe base OS on 2.0.1 and 2.0.3 is the same, but some drivers were updated there.
The base OS on 2.1 is a bit newer and has even more recent drivers, so it would be the next thing to try.
