LAN interface stops passing traffic - routing?

[b43]

I have a pfsense 1.2.2 installation that looks like this:

LAN –- 100Mb swx --- pro/1000 em0 if - pfsense box - pro/1000 em1 if -- 100Mb swx -- WAN

The box is new: biostar MC6P mobo, amd athlon-64 LE-1640, 2Gb RAM, SATA drive, 2 x Intel PRO/1000 GT PWLA8391GTL PCI cards.

I've configged it with ACPI disabled, otherwise pretty default. I loaded and configged 1.2.2 without issue. I've run load tests for days on a test network set up the same as production, pushing > 150Mb/s bidirectionally without issue. Now that it is installed in production, the LAN interface stops passing any traffic at least once a day. Maybe this is better termed a routing problem: packets won't go from inside to outside or from the pfsense box to inside. I see no interesting entries in the server logs (/var/log/system.log) - it just stops working.

I occasionally get a "kernel em0 watchdog timeout --- resetting", then down, up, check_reload, but it's not clearly related to the stoppage. The WAN interface continues to work fine. Bouncing the LAN interface solves the problem temporarily.

I've googled this issue considerably for everything I can think of related to this and dug around on the pfsense forums quite a bit without luck.

I'm fairly baffled as to how to debug this at this point. Any helpful ideas?

Thanks.

[wallabybob]

Try pfsense 1.2.3 - see http://blog.pfsense.org/?p=377
Note the remark about improved hardware support and the download link at the bottom of the page.