[Solved] pfsense is not making sense
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lol good idea, I'll try that first.
Have you had any experience with a reinstall when an issue came up? I wonder if restoring my config on a fresh install would also "restore" the issue? I guess, I'll only know by trying.
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Likely so. I've noticed that when I screw up my settings, save them and then restore them, they are still screwed up. Maybe its just me.
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It turns out it's not my settings. A factory reset didn't help either. Is a factory reset the same as a fresh install? Could there still be some files that are corrupt or not quite right?
I'm beginning to think it could be due to the jump from 2.3.x to 2.4.0. I think that's when it also changed the freeBSD version to 11? I won't know for sure until I try a fresh install of 2.3.x and see if that fixes it or not.
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Id try a fresh install before I blamed the new version. I think that even a factory reset could leave some stray code, depending on whats been done to it.
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I'll have to wait for a time when the office is nearly empty before I do a fresh install. I may not be able to get that done for a while since I won't be in the office again till Tuesday. I guess the bit of good news is that it looks like it's not my settings. If it is due to some bit of bad/left over code, doing a fresh install of 2.4.1 will hopefully take care of that. I could run a test right after the install. Then, restore my latest config and it should get me back up and running, hopefully without issues. We shall see… but that is the game plan for now.
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I just happened to be searching around tonight as I'm embarking on my own pfsense installation.
You description seems like it somewhat matches that of this video on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2rK5F461aM
He upgraded the processor and problems went away. You may be under powered since you turned a bunch of stuff on.
Roveer
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Since then, the network topology has not changed. I have installed pfsense OS updates along the way, Snort, squid (with cache and AV), and pfblocker. I have been running speed tests recently and my upload is consistently fine. The issue is with my download speeds. I can't get above ~97 Mbps.
Snort, Squid, ClamAV and pfBlockerNG means you were turning your pfSense into a fully acting UTM device and this
on a small Atom based board with 1.6GHz so it could really be that you are not right sorted with enough horse power.He upgraded the processor and problems went away. You may be under powered since you turned a bunch of stuff on.
Could be also that the memory system gets saturated. To small footprint or to lame RAM.
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I'm in alignment with roveer's post, your box is underpowered.
Per the PFsense hardware requirements page (https://www.pfsense.org/products/#requirements), for your bandwidth you should be running:
"No less than a modern Intel or AMD CPU clocked at 2.0 GHz. Server class hardware with PCI-e network adapters, or newer desktop hardware with PCI-e network adapters."
I would also double your ram at a minimum.
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His box may technically be underpowered, but it is not showing any usual load.
@OP: Run "ps -aux" while you're doing a speedtest. We need to see what's using CPU, if any, under load.
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on a small Atom based board with 1.6GHz so it could really be that you are not right sorted with enough horse power.
Geez, guys! The celeron 1017U is an Ivy Bridge gen. Notebook CPU. Not a small-time old-school Atom.
"No less than a modern Intel or AMD CPU clocked at 2.0 GHz. Server class hardware with PCI-e network adapters, or newer desktop hardware with PCI-e network adapters."
What for? That recommendation is really old-school, even the pfSense hardware doesn't match that ;) Not even their own SG-2440 would match that description and is described as running IDS and Proxies just fine. I agree with Harvy, the screens don't show high CPU load and if the box should be that underpowered you'd see that in the 5 or 15m load values. The Celeron is a dual core, so a load of 2 would still be acceptable at peaks.
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Thanks for the replies. I wish it were as simple as my hardware being under powered. I have no beast under the hood, but I have several points to squash that argument.
1. My CPU load has never been max out even under the heaviest of use.
2. My CPU load is almost always sitting close to 0% usage. The biggest load is probably me accessing the GUI/graphs.
3. The idle process uses most of the processor.
4. I disabled all the mentioned services which are known to be a burden and still have the issue.
5. I did a factory reset and still had the issue.
6. I have 4GB of newish laptop ram. It is not fully utilized.
7. There is no use and never has been any use of swap space.I did not have this issue when I originally ran the system on 2.3.x, so I'm beginning to think it could be due to the jump to 2.4.x. It could also be that I have a botched install which happened somewhere along the way. I'm pretty sure the factory reset simply restores a config file with all the defaults from a fresh install. It's not re-imaging the partition from a recovery partition. I realized this when I saw my custom WPAD files still in the /usr/local/www/ directory even after the factory reset. I deleted those files as well just to be sure they had no part in the problem, but this made me think, if those files were untouched, what if a potentially corrupted file was also untouched. I think the only thing that makes sense at this point is a fresh install. I'll keep you all posted.
Thanks.
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It will be interesting to see what a fresh install does.
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It sounds like you have a bad Network Card, maybe not necessarily bad, but not a good supported driver. HAVP and Squid will kill your network speeds if you have a bad or unsupported driver.
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I noticed you said that Windows shows a 1Gb connection but what does the speed show as connected in pfSense? Also, anything in the logs? I've seen where it flaps so that every couple of seconds the link goes down for a couple of milliseconds and comes back causing issues like this. Doubtful since it is a VM but just an idea. Since it is a VM, how about just building a second VM and swapping over for a few minutes to test?
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Thanks for the replies.
scottdam, a bad NIC/driver could also be a possible reason. I will only know for sure if I do a fresh install. I may also have to try going back to a fresh install of 2.3.x if it is a driver issue with 2.4.0. I did disable all the packages such as squid, snort and pfblocker. That didn't help.
Stewart, both the interfaces are 1 Gb. pfSense only shows the WAN as "Media 1000baseT <full-duplex,master>" under Status > Interfaces. It doesn't show that same line for the LAN, but I do know it's gigabit. Plus, if they weren't I wouldn't have gotten 120 Mbps when connecting a non-native PC to the network on the same exact cabling. What should I look for in the logs specifically? I don't see anything indicating a dropped connection on the system tab. Would it be there or elsewhere? Do I have to change the verbose mode of the logging to see it maybe? Right now it's set to the default.
I'm not running a VM, I have it running on actual hardware.</full-duplex,master>
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Alright… so I spent several hours on this again last night while the office was quiet.
Here is what I'm 100% sure of now... it is the pfsense box. How did I come to that conclusion? In addition to everything else, my last resort was to disconnect the WAN/LAN cable from pfsense and plug it into my old Netgear which it replaced. With the same exact network topology/IP's, I was getting the full 120 Mbps down. I plugged the pfsense box back in and was getting over 100 Mbps, but still not a solid and consistent 120 Mbps I should be getting.
What did I do before plugging in the Netgear? I did a fresh install of 2.4.1. I was still not getting full down speeds. I then decided to do a fresh install of 2.3.5, but still not luck. I then swapped out the one NIC I was a little weary of, my USB 3.0 to GBE adapter. I plugged in a brand new one, but still no solution. I know... not the best NIC to be using, but I have no real choice on this box I'm running. Besides, that NIC was giving me my full download speed at one point, so I don't believe that is the issue.
During all these trials mentioned above, I was using factory default settings with no additional packages installed. The only thing I did was configure the WAN and LAN IP's. The same IP's I've been using forever.
I have one last idea which I will try hopefully tonight. I have hardware checksum offloading enabled. I'm almost certain my USB 3.0 NIC is not up to par for that feature, and according to the pfsense book that feature is broken in some NICs and will cause problems with corrupted packets and throughput. I'm suspecting I have both problems. So I'm gonna try to disable that, cross my fingers, and then reboot the box.
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Generally it's a bad idea to use the usb NICs, I see no one have luck with this crap. If it's impossible to install pci-e intel card, but you have one embedded then use VLANs and VLANs capable switch, otherwise you will need different hardware setup to make things work as desired.
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Yea, the USB NIC is not intended to be used the way I'm using it on a firewall. I was hoping I could get away with it. I thought I did for a while, but maybe I was wrong. I'm not giving up on it just yet though. Call me stubborn, but I really want to be able to make use of this tiny PC that was collecting dust, especially since it has the same footprint as my old Netgear so it fits right in. The VLAN approach might be a good solution if it does turn out to be a bad NIC. That could also be a good excuse to justify purchasing a managed switch. I do have another PC laying around with actual PCIe slots. It a has MUCH bigger desktop footprint. If this becomes a real big issue, I may end up switching over to that.
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After all this you're using USB NICS LULZ. You can't compare a Netgear (with no USB NIC) to a PFSense with a USB NIC. That's like tying one hand behind the back of the PFSense.
The USB NIC is your problem. Even IF it worked well on a prior version there's no way I'd put my life in the hands of a USB anything (besides a keyboard and mouse or my phone chargers LOL).
You're getting 100 Mb/s so who cares about the 20 Mb/s…? Sure it's annoying BUT are you ever hitting all 100 Mb/s being consumed on your network? Is Internet "slow" because you're missing 20 Mb/s...? It seems like you're missing 20% of your bandwidth but if you're only consuming say... 50 Mb/s you actually have 50% utilization you're not even using so you're not even missing the 20 Mb/s / 20%.
I'd stop the madness and so something more productive like drink beer :P
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The 20 Mbps is what raised the red flag. I'm not losing sleep over the 20 Mbps because like you said, I'm not even using close to full bandwidth. At this point I want to understand why I'm losing it, not because I actually need it. This issue has helped me learn a lot about pfsense (I'm a newbie). The education is well worth the cost of 20 (unused) Mbps and a few forum posts.
By the way, disabling the hardware check sum offloading didn't help either. I know everyone on these forums hates the USB NICs, but hatred alone wouldn't hold up in court. I'm still trying to understand how to definitively diagnose if it is a NIC issue. There must be dropped/corrupted packets if that's the case. The attached packet graphs are not clear to me. Is the WAN inpass supposed to be close to LAN outpass? The WAN to LAN would be my downstream. It looks like some packets are not making it out onto the LAN. For example, in the average, I have 983.73 pps coming into the WAN but only 915.54 pps making it out of the LAN. That's roughly 7% loss? Are there other factors such as packets not allowed due to filtering? Or would those go under the in/out block category and have nothing to do with it?
Thanks all for the help.