ActiveBackup Killing PFSense

I recently started using ActiveBackup on a Synology NAS and since enabling the ActiveBackup for M365 have had problems with my PFSense going offline and requiring me to turn off/on the power to the device.

My internet connection is a 1GB cable connection (1gbps down / 45 mbps up). My PFSense box is a Zotac Brix MI660Nano (quad core intel, 8gb ram, Samsung SSD).

When running the ABforM365 sometimes it will die after a few minutes and other times it can download 50-150GB before an issue occurs. I can see during this time it may have download speeds of anywhere from 5-70MBs as reported by the PFSense dashboard. PFSense will then randomly go totally offline - non-pingable totally locked up, can’t access the internet from any device. If I force it off and back on the downloads can resume and internet access from other machines resume.

I can see an error 65 in the PFSense gateway log as well as a php-fpm error (after the fact) but I can’t do or try anything as its totally locked up and unresponsive.

I have run this same PFSense box for years with no issues when downloading large files (several GB files, streaming video) or even uploading TBs of data to a backup provider.

I am kind of at a loss as to what the issue is or how to track it down. Any ideas on how to resolve this or track down what’s is happening?

When it crashes go to the console and see what message is there, if you can log in start going through the logs in /var/log/

Will do. Thanks so much!

Thanks @LTS_Tom, I checked the logs and saw dpinger issues (64/65) in the gateway log and “link state changed to DOWN” messages in the system log.

After some additional research it looked like I was experiencing the FreeBSD RealTek nic issue.

After implementing the changes below my job was able to complete. I checked the logs and I no longer see any dpinger issues in the gateway log nor link state changed to DOWN messages in the system log.

For anyone looking for this it appears the old consensus was to compile the updated driver from scratch but FreeBSD does now have an official package available so that is the route I went. For anyone that isn’t experienced with installing packages on FreeBSD it can all be done directly from the PFSense backend as I did.

Login to your PFSense Dashboard.

  1. Go to Diagnostics > Command Prompt and enter the command below

pkg add https://pkg.FreeBSD.org/FreeBSD:12:amd64/latest/All/realtek-re-kmod-v196.04_2.txz

(*Note: I am using PFSense v 2.5.0 on freebsd 12. If you are using an older version of pfsense you might need to change the 12 in the above line to 11)

  1. After this command successfully completes go to Diagnostics > Edit File
  2. Click browse and open /boot/loader.conf
  3. Add these two lines & save the file

if_re_load=“YES”
if_re_name="/boot/modules/if_re.ko"

  1. Reboot your pfsense

*Updated to correct my typo of pfsense version 2.5.0 on freebsd 12.2 NOT 2.4.5 on freebsd 11.X.