No WAN connection with Intel NIC
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I have an old Dell PC with a Pentium 4 that I've installed PFSense on and have up and running. The motherboard has a built-in NIC that is 100Mb speed. I have 2 single-port intel gigabit PCI NICs installed for their speed and reliability. My problem, however, is that I cannot get either of the Intel NICs to connect to WAN when configured. Both of them work just fine when configured on the LAN side, so I know they work, but act as if they are dead when I try to connect them to WAN. I'm able to get the on-board 100Mb port connected to WAN just fine, but when I switch the WAN to one of the Intel NICs it won't connect, and doesn't assign any IP address. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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Hello,
A small network diagram might help.
WAN port connects to a modem or directly to your ISP? via ethernet cable?
Some ISPs allow only one specific MAC to connect. -
Yes, WAN port is connected directly to modem via ethernet cable. When WAN is configured in pfsense to the built-in (100Mb) port everything works great, albeit slow. but if I configure WAN to one of the Intel gigabit NICs, nothing happens on the WAN side. I still get access on the LAN side to the web configurator and everything on my network is able to talk to eachother, but nothing coming or going on WAN, no internet.
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Long time since I've met an ISP limiting by MAC, but have you tried cloning the MAC from the built in NIC to the Intel NIC?
Interfaces/WAN/MAC Address -
My god, I can't believe that worked… I hate comcast so much. Thank you.
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My god, I can't believe that worked… I hate comcast so much. Thank you.
Once again. This is NOT a Comcast thing. This is how cable-modems work people!
A simple reboot of your cable-modem would have gotten you connected.
Your cable-modem simply remembered the previous device (MAC) connected to it so it refused to talk to anybody else (i.e. your new Intel nic).
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"Once again. This is NOT a Comcast thing. This is how cable-modems work people!"
I guess it depends from ISP to ISP and from modem to modem.
All cable modem I worked with did not behave as you describe, instead the ISP was limiting by MAC.
A quick call to the ISP and the new MAC was working, without a modem reboot. -
It's most likely the effect of ARP cache and the modem insisting on not clearing it until the entries time out or it is rebooted. There is a piece of technology designed for the very situation known as "Gratuitous ARP" but if the modem does not honour that there are no other options than the two I already mentioned.