Interesting problem with nic droppng out
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Hi pfSense Community! I've found the forums extremely helpful in the past several years - all of my questions have typically been answered through searching. I have small setup. Below I've listed out specs of the pfsense box and what I'm doing.
EDIT: Running pfsense 2.0.1, latest firmware on the switches…Box Spec:
Mobo: Supermicro X7SPA (D510 atom CPU, 2x 82574 nics + ipmi) (em2,em3 interfaces)
Ram: 4gb
additional nics: dual Intel pro1000 gbe nic card (em0, em1)Overview of setup:
EM3 is the WAN interface
EM2 a LAN interface (no vlans) connection to a sm2008 8 port switch. (rocksolid, up for months at a time)
EM1 is connected to a cisco SMB sg300 switch (two vlans 10.10.2.0/24 and 10.10.4.0/24 )
EM0 is not used at this timeSo, here is what is happening. I set this up and it works, for a short time. I can connect to hosts from my LAN to either vlan, as allowed by the firewall. After a varying amount of time, I cannot connect to anything on the vlans. In fact, the hosts on the vlans cannot ping the interfaces/gateways, and, all entries in the ARP tables are gone. Rebooting the SG300 switch has no impact, nor does unplugging the network cable and plugging it back in. However, as soon as I reboot pfSense, everything works great for a short time, and then stops working again until reboot. The Link LEDs remain lit, even after the nic stops responding. The interfaces are list as up even though nothing can connect. I enabled DHCP on the VLANS just to troubleshoot further. Upon reboot, leases are created. Once when I loose connectivity, the DHCP service lists the hosts as offline. I do not know if this helps. I am thinking this is a hardware problem of sorts, but did not know if anyone else has experienced a similar issue, or, had pointers on how to troubleshoot this (besides swapping hardware). Thanks a lot!
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It does sound like some low-level issue - hardware or drivers or…
If you upgrade to 2.1 then you will get a slightly newer version of FreeBSD. Maybe that will help, maybe not. It should be low risk, I don't expect you will be any worse off. But obviously make sure you are in a position to revert back to 2.0.n and have a copy of your 2.0.n config. -
Upgrading to the new version could be useful. FreeBSD 2.1 It should be, I don't expect. A small risk But of course you need to configure 2.0.and 2.0.n copy to ensure income.