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[Varga]

My problems with pfSense seem to be neverending. I was hoping it would work better than this, but I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and say maybe I have a very odd hardware combination or just rotten luck. (I'm loving pfSense so far, except for these problems, so I'd love to be able to use it.)

Right, the past two-three days I've been experiencing seemingly random disconnections from the WAN. I'm completely lost, because nothing abnormal from what I can see shows up in the logs.

I connect like this, it's fairly simply.
RJ45 in wall --> pfSense box --> Computer

When these disconnects happen, I have an IP adress and DNS servers from DHCP. BUT! I can't access anything outside of my LAN. I can navigate to 192.168.1.1. But I can't get to, for example, google.se, any e-mail, any instant messaging service, etc etc.

I don't have any prior experience with FreeBSD, only with Linux and Windows, and googling about pfSense random disconnections didn't give much.

Running 2.0.1-RELEASE (amd64) built on Mon Dec 12 18:16:13 EST 2011 FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE-p6.
AMD A4-3400 APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics
1 Intel CT Desktop Gigabit NIC (WAN interface)
1 RTL8168B chipset Gigabit NIC (LAN interface)

Any ideas? Is there something I should run in a shell when this happens to maybe get a better idea of what's going on?

[Nachtfalke]

192.168.1.1 is your modem/router in front of psense or like in your netwrok map "in the wall", right ?

Do you have high latency or packet loss on this WAN connection ? You could try to increase the "high latency to 500ms - 800ms and the packet loss to 30%-50% and member down to 20s - just for testing.

Further if you do not have any connection to the internet, can you ping something on the net like 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 ? So is it just a DNS issue or something else.

[Varga]

192.168.1.1 is your modem/router in front of psense or like in your netwrok map "in the wall", right ?

192.168.1.1 is the IP of the box running pfSense. The IP I get from the wall is a normal ISP-type IP, 85.XXX.XXX.XXX (hiding it for obvious reasons).

Do you have high latency or packet loss on this WAN connection ? You could try to increase the "high latency to 500ms - 800ms and the packet loss to 30%-50% and member down to 20s - just for testing.

I've had to turn apinger off completely. The reason for this is the time issue I've posted about in another thread. pfSense's clock runs entirely too fast, so apinger is constantly thinking the WAN interface is down. It was causing filters to reload nearly every second, disconnecting me from everything all the time. (At least, I think that was the issue.)
However, speed/latency tests I have done (bredbandskollen.se and pingtest.net) show a latency around 0-20ms, and little to no packet loss.

Further if you do not have any connection to the internet, can you ping something on the net like 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 ? So is it just a DNS issue or something else.

Last time this happened, I was unable to ping 8.8.8.8, which is what I tried. I couldn't ping it from my computer or pfSense's web GUI.

Rebooting the thing fixes the problem. Though I'd rather not have to reboot it every day.

Edit: I found I was being bombarded by the same IP on the same port at the time of the disconnection. The IP was similar to mine, and I'm unsure of whether it's malicious or something my ISP is purposefully doing.. Interestingly, it was an IP that I could ping and get response packets from, rather than just packet loss.

Edit #2: I'm beginning to suspect that this isn't a fault with pfSense, but that something's going horrendously wrong at my ISP. I can connect to and ping other computers within my /24 block.

[novacoresystems]

I've seen this issue occur when I am doing a lot of torrent downloading or something intensive. I've solved this issue by increasing the amount of states. Increase the Firewall Maximum States past the default to something like 400000 for example. Also check how much resources RAM/swap pfsense is using and see if it's a resource issue.