After just over 1 year, 2 of our 3 SG-4860 appliances have failed!
-
We had been rather happy with our SG-4860 purchases from pfSense store until
just recently when the first unit failed during a configuration change.At first I though I had just downed the unit with a misconfiguration (enabled a previously
disabled interface) but no, the unit was completely dead.
Performed power cycling, swapped power supplies with spare & hardware rest to no avail.Swapped failed unit for our offline spare and uploaded config only to find one of the 6 network
interfaces 'missing'.
By missing I mean the system detected igb0-4 instead of igb0-5.A few reboots and powercycles later we have the 6th interface detected again, most of the time.
As we're only using 4 interfaces, this wouldn't be a huge problem for us except when the
interface disappears, the ports get renumbered and interface assignment no longer match physical wiring….So, no more reboots until we can replace this appliance, and we now have a vm running
as emergency firewall if this appliance finally completely fails.To say we're disappointed in the reliability of this appliance would be an understatement.
To have the appliances fail just a couple of months after the warranty expired? Priceless....
The lesson for me is don't buy equipment you rely on, even from people you trust (i.e. pfsense),
unless you can get warranty/support for the expected life of your device.