TX underrun, pings timing out
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Ive been fighting my pfsense-box for quite some time now. I finnaly threw out my Realtec and SMC nics, they were the cause of my crashing problems. I now have an older compaq dual-port 10/100 NIC in use (I beleive it uses intel chips). Interestingly, my throughput did not improve at all.
Anyways, what my problem is now:
Ive always noticed some sites wont load, they will stop about half-way and refuse to work unless I close my browser and make another try. It wasnt any site in particular. Ebay, youtube, google, even this site. Now that I have a second monitor, I connected it to the pfsense box so I could ping from it during this internet-outages. One thing I noticed immediantly, is it starts complaining about a TX Underrun and constantly attempts to increase it. tl0 is the LAN interface, tl1 is the WAN interface:
tl0: tx underrun – increasing tx threshhold to 2048 bytes
tl0: tx underrun -- increasing tx threshhold to 2048 bytes
tl0: tx underrun -- increasing tx threshhold to 2048 bytes
tl0: tx underrun -- increasing tx threshhold to 2048 bytes
tl0: tx underrun -- increasing tx threshhold to 2048 bytes
tl0: tx underrun -- increasing tx threshhold to 2048 bytes
tl0: tx underrun -- increasing tx threshhold to 2048 bytes
tl0: tx underrun -- increasing tx threshhold to 2048 bytes
tl0: tx underrun -- increasing tx threshhold to 2048 bytes
tl0: tx underrun -- increasing tx threshhold to 2048 bytes
tl0: device timeout
tl1: tx underrun -- increasing tx threshhold to 768 bytes
tl1: tx underrun -- increasing tx threshhold to 512 bytes
tl1: tx underrun -- increasing tx threshhold to 1280 bytes
tl1: tx underrun -- increasing tx threshhold to 768 bytes
tl1: tx underrun -- increasing tx threshhold to 1024 bytes
tl1: tx underrun -- increasing tx threshhold to 1280 bytesThis lasted for several minutes, I was watching it print each line about once every 2-3 seconds. I tried pinging to google, nothing... Tried pining to the LAN ip... timed out, untill after I closed my browser window and waited about 5 seconds.
any ideas? whatever is going on, is preventing me from using the internet from time to time.
EDIT:
Ive also recently noticed a problem, if the PFsense box loses the WAN connection (unplugging the cable/rebooting the modem connected to it), it will NOT function without rebooting the pfsense box. The WAN led's flash on and off at a constant steady cycle of 2-3 seconds. The pfsense box can get an IP, but sometimes gets 0.0.0.0, or sometimes will get a correct ip but display "No Carrier" under interface status.
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If your cards lights are cycling every 2-3 seconds that seems to me like either the bus is resetting the card, or the card itself is resetting. You might try manually assigning different IRQ's to the card and insuring that the PCI slot you are using is not shared by anything else like a COM IO chip or Sound chip or the like. Most desktop grade boards share 3/4 of their PCI slots with on board hardware. Dual/Quad nic's DO NOT LIKE this at all.
If you notice, most DUAL/QUAD nic's will not run on PCI splitters installed on single PCI 1U servers. They have warnings in the manual about this. So if the PCI slot you have the card in is split with anything else, this may be leading to the behavior you're experiencing.
I would turn off everything in the bios that's not completely necessary including com ports, parallel etc, freeing up IRQ's. Then make sure your card gets IRQ's that are not used by anything else. Also avoid IRQ 11/12 if you can. 12 being the PS2 port. Older boards favored IRQ 10 for the video card. IRQ3,4,5,7.9 should be free if you turn everything off.