UPDATE 2020-05-19 8:22 PM
Services are back online, and the new hardware NIC is installed. We should be good to go!
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For the last few hours, we’ve had intermittent connectivity issues interrupting all services.
Short Answer
We may encounter this some more until I end up getting some additional hardware for the router. This should be arriving on Tuesday, May 19th.
Long Answer
My personal home network currently utilizes a custom built pfsense box. Several months ago, I had two networks on it: internal, and external. Pretty basic. For the best performance, I bought a dual gigabit port PCIe network card, with an Intel chipset.
During that point, I had the server hosted at another location. Once we had to relocate the server back to my house several months ago, I needed to add another network to the router. Specifically, a DMZ. Unfortunately, I don’t have a switch that can do VLAN trunking (yet), so I had to utilize the third port available on the router. This was the integrated network port on the motherboard.
I was hoping to avoid utilizing it at all, since it used a RealTek network chipset, and this is highly discouraged. The drivers, and overall performance, of RealTek chipsets are really poor for pfsense instances. However, I had hoped it would suffice long enough for a network upgrade at the house.
Today, that hope ran out. The interface ended up crashing, and not coming back up without a restart of the whole pfsense OS. This was due to increased network traffic that the server was making, which was slightly abnormal.
I’ve ordered another dual gigabit port PCIe card, with an Intel chipset again (because these are rock solid under load). We should be good to go once I install it. It should arrive on Tuesday.
In the meantime, I’m going to keep a few extra services down for the time being. The game services are the highest priority to keep online 🙂
Sorry for the service interruptions, and thank you for your patience.
– seifer44