Netgate 4200 crashes with WAN DHCP for FibreStream Internet
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I had PC Engines APU2 with pfSense 2.7.2. It was working without issues. I purchased new Netgate 4200 with pfSense+ 24.11. The moment I plug in ISP Ethernet cable (living in condo, they wired RJ45 cables to units, so no modems in between inside apartment) Netgate 4200 WAN interface starts going up and down overwhelming php-fpm and crashing Web GUI. Then web page says to check Crash Report that does not exist. Checked with ISP support - they said DHCP starts connection negotiation then link goes down, tries again and it goes in a loop like that until overwhelms the router. (And their switch as well). Research online shows some scattered data that Netgate 4200 igc network card has some known driver compatibility issues with some DHCP servers.
Did anyone experience such issues? What direction should I go now to resolve it?
Thanks,
Alex -
Is it trying to link at 2.5G?
If you set it to 1G does it link successfully?
Do you know what the ISP switch is that it's trying to link to?
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Spent several hours with FibreStream Support trying different scenarios. Including explicitly setting 1G etc. Their technician came today and we tried their TP-Link Router and a couple of mine like LinkSys. Every router works fine except NETGATE 4200. It crashes. To me it confirms the problem is with Netgate hardware. I will try to reach Netgate Support and see how they respond to it. Definitely Netgate problem.
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@lx70 Random thought --- did you try swapping the 4200's port roles to try a different physical port as WAN? If it's a real compatibility problem that won't help, but if there's something wrong with that specific port it'd yield useful info.
(The 4200's ports are all interchangeable, so this should just be a quick configuration rearrangement.)
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@lx70
You can also try connecting any switch between pfSense and the ISP — for example, use the same Linksys switch with two LAN-side ports. Just make sure to disable DHCP on the Linksys or use a dumb switch instead. -
Yup both good suggestions.
i have seen igc NICs get stuck in a link negotiation loop before when connected to some specific devices. But only at 2.5G. And even so it didn't actually stall out pfSense.
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Sorry, was out of town to reply earlier. Today I connected a regular D-Link switch between Netgate and ISP and it worked! No crashing! So, the problem is between Netgate 4200 NIC and whatever hardware ISP is using. I have TAC Lite support with Zero-to-Ping included with my Netgate purchase. Will submit a ticket for them and see how it goes.
Thanks for your suggestions! -
Mmm, almost certainly a link negotiation issue then. On igc NICs the options there are limited because it can only link using auto-negotiation. You can set the available speeds it negotiates at which is what the speed setting in the gui does.
