Hello, I have a project with a looming deadline that involves installing 15 pfSense firewalls at hotels to provide firewall and Captive portal services. I'm using the PFW201 hardware from Tranquilnet with the Intel NIC's (the first unit was from Tranquilnet, but when they stopped selling the units with the Intel NIC's I found the supplier and ordered direct from them. Here's what features the units are configured for (apologies for miswordings -- I don't have access to a device in front of me):
Firewall rules to allow remote maintenance from specific IP addresses Gateway Groups Captive Portal After what I thought was thorough testing, I tried to deploy a unit last night at 4am. Here's what happened: At first I had a bad connection to one of my WAN connections and so Internet was slow. I fixed the cabling issue and rebooted, so far so good. Then I replaced a switch that was defective. Now things started getting strange. First the Captive Gateway stopped redirecting users. In other words if you knew the gateway's address and browsed to http://a.b.c.d:8000 and entered the password you could access the Internet So I turned off the Captive Portal. Now I later realized this deleted the captive gateway redirect page and the incorrect password page. I don't know if this is the design or not, but it seems strange. Anyway, I rebooted. For twenty minutes Internet access worked, then it stopped working entirely. I tried browsing to the admin page. I logged in and got to the main page, but it took forever to get to another page. I was accessing wirelessly, so this could have been part of the issue. Anyway, given that Internet access stopped working after 20 minutes under very light load (there were four users on the Captive gateway when I disabled it), I bailed on the install and put the old gateway back in place. Now my question is, what is going wrong? I've tried the same config on multiple devices, so I don't think it's hardware. Could my config have become corrupted? Or could there be some issue with my config and 2.1.4 (I tested things extensively with 2.0.3 and then upgraded to 2.1.3. But when 2.1.4 came around I didn't test. Also, when I started to duplicate flash cards on Tuesday I experienced the same issue with the captive gateway (redirects not working, browsing to http://a.b.c.d:8000 and authenticating allowed access to the Internet). I hadn't gotten much sleep, and when I got back to this on Thursday the problem went away. Final crazy thought. One of the last changes I made after testing the gateway but before deployment was to change the name and the domain name. Any chance changing the domain name could have anything to do this? Please let me know if there's any information I can add. Also, thanks in advance for any insight provided. Jason M. _______________________________________________ List mailing list List@lists.pfsense.org https://lists.pfsense.org/mailman/listinfo/list
