PfSense + ProxMox + RealTek = Millions of collisions (solved)
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Hey guys, this isn't really a question. I just wanted to detail out a problem I had so that if someone else runs in to it, they'll see it here.
So I'm running pfSense 2.0.1 on ProxMox 2.1 (ProxMox is fscking awesome, btw, highly recommend checking it out). One of my NICs is dedicated Internet, and that's where the cable modem gets plugged in. It's only a 10/100 NIC because my connection speeds don't even come close to 100Mb/s so it makes sense.
In ProxMox when I create the VM, I am presented with 3 virtual NIC types to present to pfSense. I can emulate a RealTek 100Mb NIC, an Intel gigabit NIC, and then VirtIO. Since the card was 100Mb, I figured no need to emulate a gigabit card, and selected the RealTek NIC.
I didn't notice at first, mainly because I was involved in a bunch of things that kept me away from home at the time, but eventually I noticed the collisions. A stupid number of collisions. On the order of over a million collisions per day. Some folks over on Ars Technica mentioned that there was a bad RealTek driver for certain RealTek cards in FreeBSD. I'm no good with FreeBSD, so I couldn't check to be certain. But I ended up changing the RealTek virtual NIC over to the Intel virtual NIC and I've been collision free ever since.
That is all. Thank you for reading.
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Realtek and anything is a nightmare.
Open Solaris also has issues, I had to swap it with an Intel PRO 1000 CT to fix my fileserver access issues.