On Mar 18, 2011, at 2:29 AM, Chris Buechler wrote: > On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 11:44 AM, Jim Riggs > <[email protected]> wrote: >> I have been having an issue with 2.0 for a few months (beta snapshots and >> RC1) that is driving me mad. I'm hoping someone can shed some light on this. >> >> The server is a Dell PowerEdge R610 with bce0-bce3. It is a repurposed >> server, so it is built and configured as a server and for performance. In >> the simplest setup, I only have a LAN (bce0) and WAN (bce1). This is a test >> server for evaluating 2.0, so it doesn't really have much traffic. There >> are only a couple of us using it as a gateway. >> >> A few minutes after booting, the Web UI will become unusably slow or >> completely unresponsive. Sometimes we will be greeted with a 503 response. >> Other times the browser just spins forever. SSH access is similarly flaky. >> We have found that if we force some traffic through the gateway (e.g. http >> request from LAN to WAN) right after requesting a page from the Web UI or >> attempting an SSH session, it will respond to that request. >> >> I have dug through posts related to this in the forums and archives, but >> haven't found too much that's relevant. I did find one post [1], though, >> that was somewhat similar. Basically, the OP had to run tcpdump on the >> pfSense box to get it to work. I tried that, and it works! So, now every >> time I restart the pfSense box I have to log in on console or SSH (if I can >> get in) and run a `nohup tcpdump -i bce0 >& /dev/null' to make it behave. >> Note that unlike the referenced post, we do not have any trouble LAN->WAN >> through the gateway. It just seems to be problematic accessing the gateway >> itself from the LAN. >> > > Odd, then it's only working when the NIC is in promiscuous mode. > What's the exact chipset (run dmesg|grep bce0)? Some odd driver quirk, > apparently specific to only certain particular chipsets as I know > there are a number of systems running bce that don't have such issues. > > Running 'ifconfig bce0 promisc' would accomplish the same without > having to run tcpdump.
I had wondered if it was just a promiscuous mode thing, but just setting promiscuous on the IF doesn't seem to do it. (Let me do some more testing, though.) If it does work, what's the best way to make that persistent across reboots and/or upgrades? I could write an rc script, but is there a more "pfSense way"? I know there's an xml config file, but how persistent is it? I will see if there are any Dell updates available for the NIC. Here's the dmesg info: bce0: <Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5709 1000Base-T (C0)> mem 0xd6000000-0xd7ffffff irq 36 at device 0.0 on pci1 miibus0: <MII bus> on bce0 bce0: [ITHREAD] bce0: ASIC (0x57092003); Rev (C0); Bus (PCIe x4, 2.5Gbps); B/C (5.2.2); Flags (MSI) bce0: link state changed to UP bce0_vlan254: link state changed to UP bce0_vlan20: link state changed to UP bce0: promiscuous mode enabled bce0: permanently promiscuous mode enabled --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] Commercial support available - https://portal.pfsense.org
