Pfsense reboots after connecting to wireless interface

wallabybob

Please try 1.2.3. Though its marked "prerelease" the developers consider it "production ready" - see http://blog.pfsense.org/?p=377

You can download 1.2.3 from http://snapshots.pfsense.org/FreeBSD7/RELENG_1_2/

prophecy

i just upgraded to pfSense-Full-Update-1.2.3-20090407-1323 from 1.2.2 and i'm having the same problem of the pfsense machine rebooting autorandomagically. It most often occurs after wpa is enabled but has also happened when I disabled/enabled the OPT1 (wifi) interface. also using an EDI card. EW7128G

I have no idea why there isnt a simpler method of getting errors and logs after catastrophic failures such as this, but i sure wish there was. Inducing the failure several times so the error can be written down seems a bit ridiculous. dmesg would be beautiful

medisoft

same for me, after some minutes I'm conneted to wireless pfsense reboots, i tested with wpa, wpa2, wep128 and without any encoding, and is the same, with 1.2.2

my card is an USB CWD-854 with rt2501 chip.

Grim0x

By router, I assume you mean A PF-based PC.

I've had similar problems to the one you're describing.

I can think of 2 things that would cause that.

Radio signal can cause a PC to be unstable!
Inside computers, on the motherboard and on many cards, there are CLOCK GENERATORS. And these things HATE external radio waves/magnetism. They interfere with their frequency, and cause instabilities.
As I write this I remember a SCSI adapter card I had once that just hated the PC speaker :D – why cant these house mates all get along in there? : p

I had one system that would crash each time its USB wireless dongle was active in any port in the rear (where it would be close to the motherboard).
Put it on an extension, and it would be fine and dandy.
The clock gen of your mobo, and any ones found on cards hate external frequency interference.
If there are any signal leaks especially, it would cause this (I mean other than the lossy-ness experienced with the best of coax)
Try it in another port, perhaps the change of proximity with the mobo will help.

or
Do you have another system you could try the card in (with PF sense)?
That would give you a good clue of what’s going on.

OR, another CARD you could try in the system.

Now, the other is, believe it or not, partially bad Ram.
I had this one lil system that would do everything else pretty fine, but would reboot whenever it had to do anything with wireless. Happened because everything else that PF sense wanted to accomplish, didn't occupy the lower, faulty spaces of the ram chip, hence there was no instability. But when more resources were called into use, it had to - and thusly, the PC would crash. But this is more unlikely, though possible.

Good luck trouble-shooting.

medisoft

The cards are USB, and are connected with an usb extension, i tested connecting them directly and with 3 meter-long extensions, the same.

Also i have tested in 2 different PCs, with same result :) it's sofware problem, i think some problem with the driver.

I'm going to test it with linux, and see what happens there. The only problem is that vanilla kernels doens't have support for this card in master mode :(

Grim0x

yeah.
And while you're at it, test it out with windoze.
As much as I hate the corporation, they have had the muscles over the years(thanks to their conniving skills) to get much driver support. So see if it hangs up in XP.

medisoft

mmm, but i don't know how to put it in master mode like a access point in windoze….

i tested tonight in monitor mode in linux, and it worked wonderful with aircrack ;)

but right now I can't put it in master mode o linux, only on pfsense....

Grim0x

@medisoft:

mmm, but i don't know how to put it in master mode like a access point in windoze….

i tested tonight in monitor mode in linux, and it worked wonderful with aircrack ;)

but right now I can't put it in master mode o linux, only on pfsense....

what version of linux are you using?

(did you try it in windoze though?)

medisoft

ubuntu 9.01, jaunty…. i tryied with 2x00 new driver kernel, build from git, but it doesn't worked with the USB.

medisoft

Hi!

I'm testing now with another computer, this one has intel chipset, not Via…and it seems to work flawless, with the same USB dongles. it is working at full speed for about 4 hours without a single failure, so I can think that the problem is with USB support of via chipset....

do you know something about that?