No link on second NIC after reboot

LFlo

I have a weird issue on my pfsense box. After every reboot, I can't get any link on my second NIC (pcie card). This results in having no WAN IP address. The only way to solve this is to have reassign the interfaces (I get to that in a moment). The hardware configuration is as follows:

Lenovo Think Centre Desktop PC
re0 Mainboard NIC (according to pciconf): RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller
re1 Second NIC: RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-7500 CPU @ 3.40GHz
8 GB memory
512 GB SSD drive, ZFS installation

My test setup looks like this:

Internet
-> Company router
-> private company network with extra DHCP server
-> pfsense test box
-> my laptop

After installation I set WAN to re1 and LAN to re0. That way I always have access to the pfsense box if the re1 goes down. Initially I had set up a OpenVPN service but I started over with a fresh install to exclude any issues with that.

What I've tried so far:

Fresh install with BIOS instead of UEFI boot
Swapping second NIC into another PCIe port
executing /etc/rc.linkup interface=re1 action=stop && /etc/rc.linkup interface=re1 action=start after reboot. This resulted in route: writing to routing socket: Network is unreachable route: route has not been found
removing rm -rf /tmp/* in /etc/rc.reboot (I've put it back in :-) )
running /etc/rc.reload_interfaces (also results in route: writing to routing socket: Network is unreachable message)

The ONLY way to solve this after a reboot is to either disable / enable the WAN interface in the webgui or to reassign the interfaces via option 1 in console (although I expect that this will also work in webgui). After this it is working reliably and the WAN is pulling a new address from the company DHCP.

This is very inconvenient because I want to run the firewall unattended. Is there any solution or workaround? Maybe I can (re-)assign the interfaces via script but I didn't find any resources to that. Also I wanted to ask here if I am missing something before I submit an issue.
Thanks in advance!

EDIT: The test box was installed using UFS before. I had the same issue after rebooting, but NOT after reroot. Maybe this helps figuring out what is going on :D

kiokoman

try with the official driver:

https://forum.netgate.com/post/934753
https://forum.netgate.com/post/935026

pkg add https://pkg.FreeBSD.org/FreeBSD:11:amd64/latest/All/realtek-re-kmod-v196.04_2.txz

Edit /boot/loader.conf.local using "Diagnostics" > "Edit File":

if_re_load="YES"
if_re_name="/boot/modules/if_re.ko"

LFlo

Thanks for the quick reply! Unfortunately this didn't work. However, I wanted to test if the update was successful with dmesg. I could not find the driver version but I found something else (192.168.192.0/24 is the company subnet):

arpresolve: can't allocate llinfo for 192.168.192.1 on re1
(repeat above line ~90 times)
arpresolve: can't allocate llinfo for 192.168.192.1 on re1
re1: link state changed to UP
arpresolve: can't allocate llinfo for 192.168.192.1 on re1
pflog0: promiscuous mode disabled
Waiting (max 60 seconds) for system process `vnlru' to stop... done
Waiting (max 60 seconds) for system process `bufdaemon' to stop... done
Waiting (max 60 seconds) for system process `syncer' to stop...
Syncing disks, vnodes remaining... 0 0 done
All buffers synced.
Uptime: 2h44m47s

It seems that this was right before I restarted the firewall, assuming that "Uptime: 2h44m47s" is the last message before reboot.

kiokoman

if it was only at restart
those messages indicate that he was trying to arp something on a network that is no longer available
maybe because the network / interface disappear

LFlo

@kiokoman
anyway, the messages disappeared after the Realtek-Update. The network is always available, at least for the other devices in the network.