DHCP on WAN interface under Hyper-V
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Using PFSense 1.2.3-Release in a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V session.
Everything is working well using the emulated LAN adapters (NOT synthetic adapters, of course, since there is no native support for them in freeBSD) with one exception:
When pfSense boots, the WAN interface stalls for a long time and fails to get an address over DHCP. If you then enter the LAN configurator and do a release/renew in the Status->Interfaces menu, it comes right up.
I have found a few other postings online that seem to refer to this basic problem. They suggest making the following permanent change to the ifconfig of the de0 interface:
ifconfig_de0="DHCP media 100baseTX mediaopt full-duplex"
and supposedly this will cure the boot-time failure to get a WAN address.My problem is that being a relative noob to freebsd, I'm not quite sure where to put these ifconfig commands such that they will be used by pfSense without hacking up /etc/rc. <whatever>files. Is there a relatively simple way to accomplish this config change?
Thanks,
Andy</whatever> -
that's not the only problem, and that particular suggestion won't entirely fix things. I would use 2.0 instead, FreeBSD 8.1 works fine with hyperv without any hacking around, I've had one in a production role for almost a year now. In earlier versions, the NICs just won't stay reliably long term up no matter what you do.
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I'll have to give 2.0 a try then. I did manage to solve the problem in a somewhat roundabout way, just FYI, as follows:
- Added the 100basetx and full-duplex options directly to the pfsense config.xml file. This got the WAN to acquire its DHCP properly. However, for some completely unfathomable reason this seemed to cause the LAN link to come up and then fail on startup instead.
- By adding a quick script to the /usr/local/etc/rc.d directory to ifconfig down/up the LAN interface, the LAN then comes back up, and the system boots successfully.
I guess I can't say what sort of failure I'll see long-term with this solution, so I'll definitely try out 2.0 and see how things go. Thanks for the tip!
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It'll stay working for a few weeks likely, that's what I hacked in place initially, but it would fall off the network every few weeks (at most), requiring an ifconfig down/up of the interface for it to come back online. Rather than hacking yet another solution to down/up the interface, where I knew 2.0 would be perfect for what that system was running (some basic NAT and filtering), I just upgraded it and did away with the hack entirely and it's been 100% stable ever since.
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Well, I did a clean install of 2.0 and it does seem to work, although the manual entries in the config.xml for full-duplex and 100baseTX still seem to be required to get the system to boot normally. No shell script needed though.
Thanks!