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    X11SBA-LN4F vs A1SRi-2558F

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    • E
      Engineer
      last edited by

      @endy66:

      I have some good and some bad news. First, i have read from another user with the same problem. He let change the board to the new revision, but he still has the same problems. They did not occur as many as before, but they ar present. He said, its because the cheap pci-e switch on the board. Thats the bad news.

      Now the good news. On my pfsense, i have increased the mbuf size to one million, with 8gb ram that should not be a problem. I have did this last sunday evening, so 3 days before. Today i checked my logs (logging to external syslog server), and there was NO ONE entry about whatchdog timeout. Before the increase of the mbuf size, i had to wait only a few hours. I will see whats happen the next days.

      My board would timeout between 1 hour and 4 days, depending on load.  That is bad news about the board revision still doing it.  My board has been up 50+ days since the correction with no timeouts.

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      • E
        endy66
        last edited by

        Day 4 without any issue. I will check that for the next few days and will report here, but it seems to look not bad:)

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        • E
          endy66
          last edited by

          After 13 days without any Watchdog timeout, i can say that the Problem is solved for me, by increasing the mbuf size to 1000000. I hope it stays stable:)

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          • E
            Engineer
            last edited by

            @endy66:

            After 13 days without any Watchdog timeout, i can say that the Problem is solved for me, by increasing the mbuf size to 1000000. I hope it stays stable:)

            Interesting.  I had the same mbuf size of 1000000 and still had the watchdog timeouts.  Regardless, up over 60 days since the board has been 'repaired' (whatever that means from SuperMicro).

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            • E
              endy66
              last edited by

              Tomorrow i will install my new 500Mbit/s Cable Connection and make some Tests, hope there will be no Watchdog Timeouts. Does this Problem also occur on the A1SRi-2558F Board or is this only on the X11SBA-LN4F?

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              • E
                Engineer
                last edited by

                @endy66:

                Tomorrow i will install my new 500Mbit/s Cable Connection and make some Tests, hope there will be no Watchdog Timeouts. Does this Problem also occur on the A1SRi-2558F Board or is this only on the X11SBA-LN4F?

                I know it happens on the X11SBA-LN4F and X11SBA-F (from what I've read) but have saw nothing on the 2558F board.

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                • JailerJ
                  Jailer
                  last edited by

                  Still watching this thread closely. This board is everything I'm looking for but if the timeout issue doesn't get resolved I won't go ahead with it.

                  Gonna have to wait for a bit anyway. Life gets in the way and we are on a spending moratorium until jr's medical bills stop rolling in.  :-\

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                  • E
                    endy66
                    last edited by

                    Ok after a lot of testing, the watchdog timeouts are still here :(. Is this problem related to the x64 platform? I havent tested the x86 version of pfsense on this board yet, but if no one with these problems have done it, i can test it.

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                    • C
                      cmb
                      last edited by

                      @endy66:

                      Ok after a lot of testing, the watchdog timeouts are still here :(. Is this problem related to the x64 platform?

                      No. I'd try 2.3, the newer drivers may fix.

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                      • E
                        endy66
                        last edited by

                        @cmb:

                        @endy66:

                        Ok after a lot of testing, the watchdog timeouts are still here :(. Is this problem related to the x64 platform?

                        No. I'd try 2.3, the newer drivers may fix.

                        Ok, then i will install the newest build now and test it. Will report later, if the newer included drivers fix the problem.

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                        • E
                          endy66
                          last edited by

                          So, i have tested with the newest 2.3 build, but still the same issue. The watchdog times out. I think there is no other solution, as to RMA the board.

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                          • ?
                            Guest
                            last edited by

                            I think there is no other solution, as to RMA the board.

                            Did you try out high up the mbuf size? Could be a solution but is also based on the
                            amount of RAM inside of your pfSense box! If to less RAM is there after doing so, you
                            will end in a booting loop. With 8 GB you will be fine using 500.000 or 1.000.000.
                            Could solve it, but is not a must be!

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                            • E
                              endy66
                              last edited by

                              @BlueKobold:

                              I think there is no other solution, as to RMA the board.

                              Did you try out high up the mbuf size? Could be a solution but is also based on the
                              amount of RAM inside of your pfSense box! If to less RAM is there after doing so, you
                              will end in a booting loop. With 8 GB you will be fine using 500.000 or 1.000.000.
                              Could solve it, but is not a must be!

                              Yes i tried that. It works a Little bit better, but the timeout is still here on high load.

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                              • E
                                endy66
                                last edited by

                                Today, i searched the exact specs from my previous board, which i used as a pfsense box. It was a Supermicro X10SBA, which uses a Intel i210-AT chipset for the NICs…EXACTLY the same chipset, which is on the X1SBA-LN4F. So, how is it possible, that there are such problems (e.g. the "watchdog timeouts") on the newer board, which contains rhe same NIC chipset? On the older X10SBA i had NEVER suvh problems, this board was running over 1 year without any issue, since the first day i set up pfsense.

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                                • E
                                  Engineer
                                  last edited by

                                  @endy66:

                                  Today, i searched the exact specs from my previous board, which i used as a pfsense box. It was a Supermicro X10SBA, which uses a Intel i210-AT chipset for the NICs…EXACTLY the same chipset, which is on the X1SBA-LN4F. So, how is it possible, that there are such problems (e.g. the "watchdog timeouts") on the newer board, which contains rhe same NIC chipset? On the older X10SBA i had NEVER suvh problems, this board was running over 1 year without any issue, since the first day i set up pfsense.

                                  It's not the i210-AT that's the issue from what we can tell.  Port 1 is fine.  It's ports 2,3 and 4 that have the issues.  It was posted very early in the thread that ports 2,3 and 4 are connected to the PCIe lanes via a PCIe switching chip, the Pericom 608GP.  It seems there is some sort of hardware design issue in the original board that causes the watchdog timeouts on the 3 ports attached to the 608GP.  Whatever the issue, SM states that a hardware modification was done (don't specify on what) which corrects the issue.  Have been up 70 days with no issues after getting my board back.

                                  Now if the X10SBA uses the Pericom 608GP chip, it would seem that SuperMicro didn't make the same mistake on that board as they did on the X1SBA-L / LN4F boards.

                                  Edit:  the X10SBA uses the PLX_PEX8605 PCIe switching chip, not the Pericom 608GP.  Looks like that's the difference between the board with timeouts vs the one without.

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                                  • E
                                    endy66
                                    last edited by

                                    Ok that makes sense, thank you for the clarification.

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                                    • N
                                      nib01
                                      last edited by

                                      As I'm reading all the comments here in this thread, am becoming more and more confused as time goes on.

                                      Between the two boards X11SBA-LN4F vs A1SRi-2558F, please give your final thoughts. Quick assist and AES-NI is a must, and this will be deplolyed on small lab/office (Plex, NAS, 5x AP, VMwares, 5x PCs, 5x wireless devices, etc).

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                                      • ?
                                        Guest
                                        last edited by

                                        Between the two boards X11SBA-LN4F vs A1SRi-2558F, please give your final thoughts.

                                        Take a SG-4860, SG-8860 or XG-2758 1U & mSATA and thats it.

                                        Quick assist and AES-NI is a must,

                                        AES-NI is still working and Intel QuickAssist is coming in 2016 as it is known until today.

                                        • Link1
                                        • Link2

                                        and this will be deplolyed on small lab/office (Plex, NAS, 5x AP, VMwares, 5x PCs, 5x wireless devices, etc).

                                        It is all about what functions, options, services will be used or offered and which packets will be installed
                                        and what Internet connection speed is in usage. Also a smaller office with the need of a real UTM device
                                        will be on the need of much more power then pfSense as a pure firewall and the captive portal is. And
                                        on top of this there are many other points that would be jumping in on top of this, likes perhaps if the
                                        DMZ and LAN switch are capable of 10 GbE or are sorted with SFP+ ports you would perhaps more lucky
                                        with the XG-2758 1U rack mount version only as an example. But for Internet speed under 1 GBit/s and
                                        pfSense as a pure firewall only the SG-2440 would perhaps enough. Who knows, tell us more about your
                                        use case please.

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                                        • R
                                          RAND0M1ZER
                                          last edited by

                                          Has anyone having the watchdog time out problem been able to resolve it by updating the BIOS or firmware?

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                                          • O
                                            OLBaID
                                            last edited by

                                            Bumping this thread.

                                            Just bought a SM SuperServer E200-9B. Added Kingston 120gb ssd and 8gb of crucial 1333 SODIMM.

                                            Currently I am getting Watchdog timeouts on the LAN (IGB1) interface. I am watching the new 2.3 thread here:

                                            https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=110710.15

                                            Possible root cause:
                                            It seems like it might be specific to SMP (>1 CPU core)

                                            i did find older post on watchdog timeouts:

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

                                            Now I have found this thread. The SuperServer E200-9B is currently using 3.2.1 PFsense. Bios revision is 1.0 (there is a 1.0b - but no changelog information i can find). IMPI firmware is 00.55 (newest).

                                            I do have some fallback ALIX boards in use previously but I am concerned that the SM SuperServer E200-9B Pericom 608GP is the issue here. The previous post on RMA do show an EEPROM Firmware update of the NIC:

                                            quote author=ldean link=topic=98230.msg594532#msg594532 date=1455223690]
                                            Just wanted to update the thread.  We received our box back from supermicro yesterday and will be installing it into production tomorrow.  The repair report is somewhat vague about what they changed, but maybe it makes more sense to someone else:

                                            Customer Reported Symptoms:
                                            Watchdog timeout on ethernet ports.  Per TS, need ECO 18137
                                            
                                            Test result notes and repair:
                                            REPORTED PROBLEM FOUND.  WATCHDOG TIMEOUTS ON ETHERNET PORTS.  M/B HW ECO COMPLETED BY REWORK.  M/B BIOS, IPMI FW UPDATED TO CURRENT REVISION DONE.  CPU, DIMM SLOT DETECTION VERIFIED.  NIC PORT, USB PORT, IPMI CONNECTION TEST PASS.  NIC PORT LAN EEPROM FW UPDATED TO CURRENT REVISION COMPLETE.  NIC PORT PASSED OVERNIGHT PING TEST.  COM PORT CONNECTION VERIFIED.  SYSTEM HARDWARE FUNCTIONAL TEST PASS.  ECO VERIFIED.  ALL M/B SCREWS CHECKED.  TEST PASSED.
                                            

                                            I'm not too sure what the ECO refers to.  Anyone have an idea?

                                            https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/42296/SMSSE200-9B%20block.JPG

                                            My Question is this hardware or PFsense 2.3 related (as others are experiencing the issue as well)? I have no issue to RMA this board back (although i really like it beyond this watchdog issue).

                                            Any response is appreciated.

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