PF sense crashes on large files

Networking & Firewalls
1

Hi all
We used your guide and setup PFsense as our firewall. It worked!
There is however a problem

I have sent terabytes of data during the testing and all seemed OK
The other day I went from 5gb files to 30gb files

I can move data from the Red to the Yellow (WAN to DMZ) and from the Red to the Green (LAN)
But if I try to move 30gb files from the LAN to the DMZ, it will crash! I mean a reboot crash I can not even get into the GUI. All is fine with 5GB files

The system is AMD 3300 and 165gb RAM with the 1gb reltek mother board LAN (This is the RED / WAN side) it is an ASUS AMD4 mother board and 2 TPlink 32bit 1GB lan cards (DMZ and the LAN). I did try reducing the network speed to 100MB but it still crashed. The only thing in common with the crashing is the TP-Link PCIE LAN cards, but these appear to be supported.

Any ideas on what tests I can do to identify the issue so that it can be solved? I was thinking of getting a 10gb card to replace one of the TP-links so that there is at least a variation of cards.

I don’t have a spare system to spin up, the issue only occurs on large files (10GB is under test to identify the size before the crash) I

2

Not a problem I have run into before. If you have services such as Snort/Suricata try turning them off and see if the issue persists.

3

Thanks for the info. I am going to reload the reltek drivers as they may be the old ones, there was a watchdog issue with these drivers a while back and the scuttlebutt is that this is my issue and that freebsd and pfsense have not picked up the latest

4

May not be applicable but on TrueNAS Realtek drivers are a problem. Both TrueNAS and pfSense are both based on BSD and there does not appear to be good support for Realtek. I would consider looking for an Intel NIC…

5

I think that it is applicable, it may be that FreeBSD have not updated the driver for whatever reason.
I have tested these NICs in windows with larger payloads and no problems. I have undated the drivers and will re commence burn in tests over the weekend… Fingers crossed

6

Well some good news. It works! That does make me happy
I have decided to however order a intel 340t4 card, as I don’t want to be caught again with needed to do a separate load for the NICs as I may not always be able to do such and I am a firm advocate of “It must work out of the box”. Thanks for all the input too. One thing to consider is that with the “better” card I can do things like offloading etc