New to pfsense, what are my options? Need help!

ns7979

Thanks mate….

sigh

Yeah, you're welcome. And thanks for nothing.

If someone has any real advice or could point me to any specific documents / articles / howtos or have any ideas that are actually relevant to my question it would be greatly appreciated.

Supermule

1: https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Gateway_Settings

2: https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Example_basic_configuration

https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Setup_Squid_as_a_Transparent_Proxy

https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/SquidGuard_package

https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Traffic_Shaping_Guide

What more do you need?

Oh and get your modem running in bridgemode so you dont do double NAT.

ns7979

@Supermule:

1: https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Gateway_Settings

2: https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Example_basic_configuration

https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Setup_Squid_as_a_Transparent_Proxy

https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/SquidGuard_package

https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Traffic_Shaping_Guide

What more do you need?

Oh and get your modem running in bridgemode so you dont do double NAT.

Thanks for posting something useful instead of just "RTFM".

These are the exact links I followed to setup my pfsense box… I have gone back through them over and over and verified that I did each step, in order... still not getting internet through the firewall... even with the default rules allowing all traffic on LAN and I can access the internet from the pfsense box. I was also not able to resolve the bandwidth saturation problem with pfsense... and I spent hours testing and tweaking settings as suggested in the traffic shaping guide link.

doktornotor

Why don't you just restore you previous working configuration, nuke the broken shaper and move on? Traffic shaping on pfSense requires a lot of reading (instead of unproductive rants), plus, you are essentially killing it with the proxy plague.

Want a simple shaper? Here.

ns7979

@doktornotor:

Why don't you just restore you previous working configuration, nuke the broken shaper and move on?

Since I was never able to get QoS working satisfactorily I didn't consider it a working config so I never backed it up. :(

@doktornotor:

Traffic shaping on pfSense requires a lot of reading (instead of unproductive rants),

I understand this, I spent several hours studying and following the Traffic Shaper Guide (as well as some other posts and was able to get the latency much better improved but no matter what settings I used I couldn't match the performance of the QoS on my router. It gets frustrating when you don't have days on end to put into trying to simply setup a firewall and proxy server so I decided to go back to tomato's QoS since it seems to be much better implemented or using a different algorithm that works better with my particular situation.

@doktornotor:

plus, you are essentially killing it with the proxy plague.

I had squid disabled during all my QoS trial and error, as to not complicate things.

@doktornotor:

Want a simple shaper? Here.

Cool thanks, I'll give it a try!

ns7979

Now I can't get any traffic through the firewall… even after doing a factory reset and having it setup like this:

internet --> pfsense --> desktop pc

Still have internet access on the pfsense box though.... just can't get access the internet from any devices connected to the pfsense box.

ns7979

After failing to get internet connectivity to any devices beyond the firewall after several factory resets I decided to reformat and reinstall… which corrected the connectivity issues.

@doktornotor:

Want a simple shaper? Here.

Tried using CODELQ for QOS like you suggested and still got 2000+ ms ping times with 1 youtube video playing in 360p. With Tomato doing the QoS on my old ASUS router and I can have 10+ youtube videos playing at once and ping times remain under 100ms. I have tried many many many different combinations of QoS settings with pfsense and none of them have lead to a useable internet connection… even with no other packages installed and only 1 device connected to the pfsense box which is connected directly into my internet connection. What gives?

doktornotor

You know what? Stick with Tomato… I don't see this thread getting anywhere near anything productive. Noone can debug your QoS attempts with unknown configuration. And frankly, while the horrible proxy thing is in place, you won't get any decent shaping at all using the traffic shaper. If you insist, play with stuff like Squid's delay pools or whatnot.

ns7979

@doktornotor:

You know what? Stick with Tomato… I don't see this thread getting anywhere near anything productive. Noone can debug your QoS attempts with unknown configuration.

What information would be needed to debug my QoS? I'd be happy to provide any information that would be helpful, screenshots of my configs, whatever.

I would be happy to stick with tomato but it can't do web caching or offer the level of parental controls which is what brought me to pfsense.

What steps would I need to take to setup pfsense behind my tomato router, and let tomato handle Gateway, DHCP, QoS and have the pfsense box handle Firewall/NAS/Proxy/Web Filtering/DNS, etc?

I was thinking something like this:

Internet –> Tomato Router (QoS/DHCP) --> Pfsense Box ---> Switch ---> LAN

@doktornotor:

And frankly, while the horrible proxy thing is in place, you won't get any decent shaping at all using the traffic shaper. If you insist, play with stuff like Squid's delay pools or whatnot.

Like I've stated several times now all my QoS testing was done with the proxy disabled, and now I am running with no packages installed and getting the same results.

kejianshi

I'd dump whatever I didn't need. Squid would be at the top of my list.

Then I'd set up simple traffic shaping.

Try that.

ns7979

@kejianshi:

I'd dump whatever I didn't need. Squid would be at the top of my list.

Then I'd set up simple traffic shaping.

Try that.

@ns7979:

I had squid disabled during all my QoS trial and error, as to not complicate things.

@ns7979:

I have tried many many many different combinations of QoS settings with pfsense and none of them have lead to a useable internet connection… even with no other packages installed and only 1 device connected to the pfsense box which is connected directly into my internet connection.

@ns7979:

Like I've stated several times now all my QoS testing was done with the proxy disabled, and now I am running with no packages installed and getting the same results.

kejianshi

After abit of reading, I just noticed. No hardware specs.

What is this running on? CPU? RAM? Disk space? etc etc…

I can imagine, for instance that if your machine was running low on ram and was deep into swap usage things might get pretty laggy.

(So, by "disabled" you mean there is no squid installed on your system?)

ns7979

@kejianshi:

After abit of reading, I just noticed. No hardware specs.

What is this running on? CPU? RAM? Disk space? etc etc…

I can imagine, for instance that if your machine was running low on ram and was deep into swap usage things might get pretty laggy.

(So, by "disabled" you mean there is no squid installed on your system?)

Yes, by disabled I mean I removed all the packages related to squid to rule them out.

System stats:

Name pfSense.localdomain
Version 2.2.1-RELEASE (amd64)
built on Fri Mar 13 08:16:49 CDT 2015
FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE-p6

You are on the latest version.
Platform cdrom
CPU Type AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+
2 CPUs: 1 package(s) x 2 core(s)
Uptime 01 Hour 49 Minutes 45 Seconds
Current date/time
Wed Mar 25 21:58:31 UTC 2015
DNS server(s) 127.0.0.1
8.8.8.8
8.8.8.1
Last config change Wed Mar 25 21:08:01 UTC 2015
State table size
0% (126/303000)
Show states
MBUF Usage
1% (1270/189286)
Load average
0.00, 0.02, 0.00
CPU usage
(Updating in 10 seconds)
Memory usage
7% of 3036 MB
Disk usage
/ (cd9660): 100% of 223M
/tmp (ufs in RAM): 17% of 19M
/var (ufs in RAM): 61% of 31M
/etc (ufs in RAM): 42% of 19M
/usr (unionfs): 94% of 242M
/conf (ufs in RAM): 1% of 5.4M
/home (ufs in RAM): 0% of 5.4M

last pid: 38297; load averages: 0.01, 0.02, 0.00 up 0+01:49:17 21:58:03
123 processes: 3 running, 99 sleeping, 21 waiting

Mem: 47M Active, 45M Inact, 173M Wired, 134M Buf, 2692M Free

ns7979

Oh, and I am running off the live CD at the moment… testing QoS setups with a clean install with no additional packages. When I was using squid it was running from a hard drive install on the 80GB SSD drive in the box.

kejianshi

No idea. I wouldn't be testing a livecd though. Thats just me.

Keep banging away. It can be done.

ns7979

@kejianshi:

No idea. I wouldn't be testing a livecd though. Thats just me.

Keep banging away. It can be done.

I hear ya, I've been switching back and forth between the live cd and hd install to see if it made any differences… but nope.. same results either way.

kejianshi

You will get some additional latency with shaping.

ns7979

@kejianshi:

You will get some additional latency with shaping.

Well with Tomato QoS I am able to get consistently under 100ms ping times even when the bandwidth is saturated… and voip / games / etc remains low latency and lag free. It took some learning to setup, but I had it up and running great in a couple of hours of tweaking and fine tuning and it has been working without a hitch for a couple of years now.

Ideally I'd like to setup the pfsense firewall between the tomato router (gateway) and the rest of my LAN (switch) and let tomato handle QoS/DHCP and let the pfsense box handle everything else (Proxy/Filtering/Firewall/NAS/DNS/OpenVPN) but I am not sure what steps to take to set this up and I am not having any luck finding information on how to make it work...

kejianshi

That configuration is the opposite of ideal. Also, how are you measuring latency?