I’m still fairly noob at this, so pardon my ignorance, please. I’ve been using pfsense for a few months now and when I installed it, it just worked. Slowly, but surely, I’ve been adding packages. I recently screwed up such a package installation and had to do a clean reload of pfsense on my router. This seemed to work, but I was experiencing some issues. Most of these I got working by uninstalling/reinstalling the various devices/services. Most of it seemed to be related to DNS. I thought I had everything ironed out, but then my PC (Windows 10), which is the only thing I have to access everything else, started dropping my Internet connection after about ten minutes and often lost connection to the network as a whole. Usually, it would drop out until I rebooted, but occasionally the network would come back for a bit, only to dropo out again later. Sometimes it was just the Internet, but I could access the other devices on the network. It’s still doing it, but intermittantly. At one point, the connection lasted 3 hours, but it always drops. At first, because as far as I could tell, everything else could access the Internet, I thought only the PC was affected and that this was a hardware issue, so I swapped out cables and updated drivers. But after plugging it directly into the fiber modem, I’m fairly certain it’s relateed to the router. I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s like there are two things on the network are interfering with each other. A couple of the error messages the PC is giving are “Firefox wasn’t able to connect to mozilla.cloudflare-dns.com.” and “Security or firewall settings might be blocking the connection.” I’m running 2.7.2. Any help would be appreciated. I am happy to produce whatever logs or screenshots would be helpful to fix this. Thanks.
Set up a ping test to ping the firewall from your computers to confirm there is not an issue with the connecting between your system and pfsnese.
You can also use the Status Monitor in pfsense as well
Unless you have VLANs, connections to devices on the same network won’t go through pfsense on the router.
If you lose connectivity to other devices on the same network as you, and the switch is working fine as well as the other devices, and you ruled out any hardware issues, try and set up a static IP address for your computer. It feels like your computer is periodically losing it’s IP address.
Thanks for responding. Sorry that it took so long to respond. I’m trying to work through it’s maddening.because the network doesn’t stay up long enough to watch the videos or even do many tests. I’ve mostly been without a network since I posted the original message. I don’t know how to set up a ping test, so I just pinged the server from my PC and then pinged my PC from the router.
When I pinged the firewall and got this:
Pinging 192.168.65.1 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 192.168.65.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.65.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.65.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.65.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Ping statistics for 192.168.65.1:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms
When I pinged from the router, I got this:
Pinging 192.168.65.1 with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Ping statistics for 2.168.65.1:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),
The latter was when the network was actually up.
Oh, and a static IP didn’t help.