23.01 upgraded from 22.05 appears to be causing cable modem on WAN port to lock up
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Hello,
Summary: It appears as if pfSense 23.01 is randomly causing my cable modem to lock up (multiple times per week) in away that requires a power cycle of the modem to recover. pfSense 22.05 on the same hardware (with the same cable modem) does not do this.
I’ve been using 22.05 on a Lanner NCA-1510D – I think it may be similar to something that Netgate had in the past – it had an non-stop uptime of about 150 days with no issues. There’s a cable modem (Arris TM3402A) on the WAN port (Intel i210)
I tried upgrading to 23.01 RC and after dealing with some upgrade issues it seemed to boot and run okay. However, randomly, I would get into a situation where the WAN side seemed to go down. At first, I’d just reboot both the cable modem and pfense box. Things ran fine for a while after that. Eventually, I found that just rebooting the cable modem was sufficient to get the system back to normal.
I really didn’t know if something on the ISP’s side changed of if it was tied to 23.01RC. I changed back to 22.05 (via a boot environment snapshot). The system ran with no issues – the WAN seeming to go down no longer happened.
A while later, 23.01 was released, so I tried again. I encountered the same problem. The system would seem to be running fine and then suddenly external internet connections were down. I found nothing in any of the logs around the time things stopped working to suggest what was going on. But it was always recoverable by just cycling power on the cable modem. I finally got tired of cycling power every day or so (the interval was not consistent) and went back to 22.05 again. Things have been stable since then.
I had forgotten that, in my monitoring system, Zabbix, I was pinging the cable modem once a minute. Looking at that graph (ICMP response time) over time, there is an increase in ping response time during the two times I was trying out 23.01. The pings also reported packet loss during those intervals. It seems like that may be correlated with the eventual inability to talk to the cable modem through the WAN port. When the internet did go “down”, using the ISPs remote modem reset function was unsuccessful – only a hard power cycle recovered things.
Could there be something related to the newer FreeBSD version and the NCA-1510, driver wise? The configuration and settings from 22.05 and 23.01 were the same (unless the upgrade tweaked something) – Could there be a new system tunable needed or one that needs to be changed for the newer FreeBSD version? What sort of logging that’s not default could be turned on to capture more of what’s going on?
The hardware has been very stable and reliable from using 2.6CE to 22.01 to 22.05. The cable modem's FW is dated 2022.02.15, so it hasn't changed through my use of 22.01 and 22.05. So there's something else that's changing when I upgrade to 23.01 that I can't determine...
Has anyone else encountered anything like this?
Thank you for the thoughts and ideas.
Jay
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@ajaxous said in 23.01 upgraded from 22.05 appears to be causing cable modem on WAN port to lock up:
Arris TM3402A
https://approvedmodemlist.com/intel-puma-6-modem-list-chipset-defects/
Try changing your WAN mac address to get a different IP to rule out someone sending the packets that can trigger this particular chipset to lockup.
