Hi Guys,
I have been running a pfSense firewall for about 2 years now and yesterday I noticed that my Lan 1 was showing up as 100Mb instead of 1000Mb. I’m trying to figure out what steps I should take to remedy the problem. I have a quad port intel Nic card installed into a Dell Desktop machine. I have changed the cables and switch and still have the same 100Mb listed. I’m about to just start over with a fresh install of pfSense but wanted to reach out to this forum before I did that.
I’ve seen this happen with dodgy cables, but if you’ve swapped them out perhaps not. It does sound like a hardware issue, not sure putting in a clean install will do anything.
Perhaps check your quad card is properly seated in the slot.
Back up your configuration so it is easy to get running again with the fresh install. If the interface is 1000 with a fresh install, then changes back to 100 after applying the old config, then you know it is a config issue.
You could try a reboot with the cable unplugged, then plug it back in to see if anything changes.
I did a fresh install and it was still at 100mb. I enabled the other interface on the card and it runs at 1000Mb. At this point I think the 2nd port on the nic is bad. When one port goes bad on these nics are the other ones soon to follow? Should I go ahead and try an replace it? I mean it has 4 ports, still got 2 good ones for now.
Could be a few different reasons for a port to go bad, I’d look at the “fingers” that provide contact to the cable and see if one was bent or lost it’s spring. That’s the only type of failure I’ve seen in the last 20 years besides the card just doesn’t work.
For the cost of a new card, I’d probably buy a replacement and use this partly non-functional card as a backup. I’m guessing it is just a common Intel card that you can probably buy for $30. Cheaper if you only buy a 2 port card.
Thanks, I ordered one on Ebay for $35. I’ll take a look at the fingers once I get a chance. I do have a 2 year old that likes to pull on cables. Probably what happened.
If you are using a managed switch, then I would put those ports on a LAGG to the switch and use vlans. If one port has a problem then you have redundancy. While I have a LAN set up, I don’t really use it for anything.
If there is a problem I don’t want to waste time trying to get online.
Here is what I ended up doing. I took the bad port that was running at 100Mb and just used it for my DVR Camera system and then moved everything else over to the 1000MB port. I’ll probably just run it like that until it dies completely.