(Resolved) Dell r310

thinktank

Hei Everyone,

I've been having a really hard time setting up my two new firewalls. After many years of pfsense lovin', i'm getting a lot of weirdness on this new hardware.

After screening the forums i've come to a conclusion that there are many issues regarding Dell R210 and Dell r310 servers.

Issues i've encountered are:

Installation hangs
WAN interface hanging on bootup
DHCPD hanging on bootup
Slow web interface / sometimes throws out Service Not Available
Kernel Panics

Is there anyone here with any information about tweaks or gotchas?

wallabybob

I have a vague recollection of some tweaks relating to Broadcom NICs (bge and/or bce) and multiple CPUs. I suggest you search the forums for bce then repeat for bge.

stephenw10

Some stuff is in the wiki: http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Tuning_and_Troubleshooting_Network_Cards

Steve

thinktank

We have something going in thread: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,40606.0.html

When a solution is found i'll drop the details in here for future use.

thinktank

After a lot of solution-hunting it seems all of my issues have been resolved.
It seems that all of the above panics, unresponsivness etc. was caused by MBUF usage.

By adding:

kern.ipc.nmbclusters="131072"
hw.bce.tso_enable=0
hw.pci.enable_msix=0

to /boot/loader.conf.local
The system seems to be running fine. I'll be stresstesting the system over the next week(s) and hope to be running this in production from January 2012.

Thanks to everyone from post: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,40606.0.html for helping me figure this out.

wallabybob

It might be worth issuing the pfSense shell command netstat -m from time to time during your testing to see if the mbuf usage stabilises or if you get allocation failures.

thinktank

I will thanks.

YoMarK

This saved me bigtime today.
Just upgraded a firewall(HP Proliant with 4x broadcom) with 1.2.3 to pfsense 2.0.1 and had all kinds of problems.
Most annoying thing was that i could not SSH or HTTP at all(except for 1 time that the login screen showed, but it was so slow that I was never able to really login).
After adding the above /boot/loader.conf.local, all was well.
Tnx!