Extended link down state, no connectivity after link up

[rbtim]

Greetings-

I'm experiencing an odd situation. On a system running pfSense 2.1.3-RELEASE on i386 (6x Intel NICs, Intel G2030 CPU, 1GB RAM, etc), the use case lends the unit's LAN to be physically disconnected (think lab environment). If the interface is left down overnight, upon reconnecting the LAN interface (ethernet link up), I see proper functionality in the logs:

Jun 24 14:12:44 pfSense php: rc.linkup: HOTPLUG: Configuring interface lan
Jun 24 14:12:44 pfSense php: rc.linkup: DEVD Ethernet attached event for lan
Jun 24 14:12:42 pfSense kernel: em1: link state changed to UP
Jun 24 14:12:42 pfSense check_reload_status: Linkup starting em1

The proper LAN IP is assigned to the interface em1, but traffic will not pass. This includes all traffic initiated from the pfSense host to another host on the LAN, or vice versa. For all intents and purposes, interface status, logs, link state, everything point to a properly working system, but again, traffic will not pass.

The only way to solve this issue is to manually issue from console via CLI an 'ifconfig em1 down; ifconfig em1 up' which resolves the issue immediately. Of course, a reboot also resolves this.

So, does anyone have ideas or suggestions on how to resolve this? I initially expected some odd link state detection problem with the NICs (as in Realtek tradition), but that is not the case, given they are Intel NICs, and the logs indicate correct state.

–Tim