Posted by5 months ago
I have two identical boxes running pfsense, they are both these HP T620 Plus units AMD GX-420CA CPUs, 4GB ram and I believe 16GB built in SSD.
I cant seem to figure out why my other device, anytime we try to get to Dashboard (main page) after going to any other page like DHCP Server, or Interface Settings, really any other page you are on then going to Dashboard it takes a solid 10secs before the page appears. Every other page is snappy, I can go from DHCP Server settings to WAN interface to Rules, super quick, pages load in a flash. But anytime going to Dashboard is slow. There is no high CPU usage, once page loads its like 3% usually. This box was loaded from scratch using 2.4.4 so there are no upgrade remnants. Someone mentioned could be php_errors under /tmp but that has a file size of 0. Any help or guidance on this?
My other box (identical HP T620 Plus) is perfectly fine, so at a loss.
5 comments
I'm dealing with an annoying situation in a small network in my church, which I'm the primary volunteer IT caretaker, of about 20 PCs, give-or-take.
We're in Chattanooga, home of Gigabit internet, so we have plenty of bandwidth (100mb connection).
The pfSense hardware is, according to the pfSense dashboard:
Both NIC's (WAN + LAN) are gigabit ports. This thing has 2GB RAM.
We have a computer lab / after school tutoring program, so I'm using pfSense for content filtering with Squid and Squidguard.
A week & a half ago, unbeknownst to me, another IT guy came in and rearranged a bunch of IT equipment and mounted some things to the wall in the network closet without talking to me first.
That happened to be the same weekend a big storm blew through town.
Since then, internet has been spotty. Multiple times throughout the day, internet begins to slow down, and keeps slowing down until its unusable, and then most (if not all) of the folks report that its downright broken with no access to the outside world.
As I'm not on-site very often, its hard for me to actually troubleshoot the problem when it actually happens. The solution (which I don't really like, but it gets the job doen) has been to pull the power from everything in the network closet (pfSense + 1 of the Ubiquiti APs, the Cisco SG-100, and the ISP's equipment), plug everything back in, and everything comes back up at full speed.
However, at times that I have been able to be on-site, I've noticed that I'm unable to ping the gateway (pfSense) whenever internet goes down (10.0.0.1), while I am able to ping other internal devices, such as the printer located at 10.0.0.2.
Reviewing the pfSense dashboard, I've never seen traffic become saturated. We have a 100mb connection, so have plenty of bandwidth. No servers and no high-bandwidth applications are on-site.
Symptoms to me sound exactly like a Spanning Tree issue (we don't have any smart switches, although I do have a Cisco SG-100 at the core of the network.
I checked all our switches (we only have 3 throughout the building - none with more than 8 ports), and hand-traced all of the cables to make sure there are no physical loops, and make sure switches aren't plugged into each other multiple times.
So then I upgraded the pfSense hardware from 2.1.3 to 2.1.5, and upgraded the firmware on all 4 of our Ubiquiti UniFi wireless APs. I also didn't have a wireless controller running continuously, so I installed the software onto one of the staff PCs that is almost always on, so that the controller remains present.
(If you know anything about Ubiquiti UniFi, you don't have to have the controller running continuously, but I figured it wouldn't hurt)
Running a lot of pings earlier today from my own PC (Ubuntu) when the internet was slow, I saw a LOT of packet losses. I noticed that as I would run a ping to a particular external IP address, there would be a lot of packet losses at the beginning, but the longer I let ping run, the faster ping responses would be (and the more consistent / reliable).
Reviewing the Proxy Filter config on the firewall, I noticed in the Cache Management of the Proxy Server section that the Memory Cache Size was 32mb while the Maximum Object Size in RAM was set to 64mb. Realizing this could cause a problem, I increased the Memory Cache Size up to 256mb, and I turned off completely the Hard Disk Caching.
I'm hoping that'll help, but we'll watch the network over the next 24-48 hours or so.
(Update: This didn't seem to help. 5 minutes after I left, I got a call that the internet was down. So I came back and swapped out the pfSense device with a temporary Cisco Linksys router, and we'll see what happens).
Are there any other suggestions or things I should look into in troubleshooting this ongoing issue? 1 thought I do have is that the guy who moved all of the network equipment without asking me first could have pinched a cable. I replaced the cable from the pfSense device going to LAN, but that didn't help. Psp games visual novel english. Another thought I have is that there could have been a surge of some sort because of the storm, but everything in the network closet is behind a APC Surge Protector. Regardless, that was when the issues started.
I have WireShark, but I'm not entirely sure what to look for in a Packet Capture. Perhaps some pointers on what to do with a packet capture would be helpful too.
David W
David WDavid W2,39244 gold badges2828 silver badges5757 bronze badges
Browse other questions tagged pfsensewiresharkpacketloss or ask your own question.
I love pfsense, opensense, and clearos. They are opensource right?, its free!!. But the major problem with these are the hardware. Being a student I cannot afford a new mini itx build with 4 gbe ports. Older hardware are just too inefficient ( I don't even have older hardware). x86-64 is power intensive platform. Most of pfsense hardware only advertise idle power consumption, while they should also be including full load values. I bet it will be over 70W.
- b8883 years ago@Mark Furneaux tried pfsense on virtualbox. The problem is I can only access the webconfig if I have one virtual nic (over the WAN). I just can't seem to access over the lan. Can you pls help me? I didn't have this problem with clearos.
- b8883 years ago@Mark Furneaux Thanks for the reply. Some quick online searches say normal wifi routers consume around the same power. I will be looking into details of official pfsense hardware. The only thing that I care about right now is efficiency (power consumption).
- Srdjan Rosic3 years agoYou have a good point, 100W 150EUR/year where I'm from, which is also the cost of a fully kitted out brand new atom box.
I guess the assumption that pfsense is making is that you can get a working pc for free and that over the course of a year, you'll figure out where to go. - bobdvd3 years agoI've ordered a J1900 mini-PC which I am hoping I can use to try pfSense. I have seen some reviews of it and it looks capable.
- Mark Furneaux 3 years agoDefinitely not 70W! Give the specs, those boxes would max out at about 15W under full load, of which they are unlikely to get even close to.
I'm dealing with an annoying situation in a small network in my church, which I'm the primary volunteer IT caretaker, of about 20 PCs, give-or-take.
We're in Chattanooga, home of Gigabit internet, so we have plenty of bandwidth (100mb connection).
The pfSense hardware is, according to the pfSense dashboard:
Both NIC's (WAN + LAN) are gigabit ports. This thing has 2GB RAM.
We have a computer lab / after school tutoring program, so I'm using pfSense for content filtering with Squid and Squidguard.
A week & a half ago, unbeknownst to me, another IT guy came in and rearranged a bunch of IT equipment and mounted some things to the wall in the network closet without talking to me first.
That happened to be the same weekend a big storm blew through town.
Since then, internet has been spotty. Multiple times throughout the day, internet begins to slow down, and keeps slowing down until its unusable, and then most (if not all) of the folks report that its downright broken with no access to the outside world.
As I'm not on-site very often, its hard for me to actually troubleshoot the problem when it actually happens. The solution (which I don't really like, but it gets the job doen) has been to pull the power from everything in the network closet (pfSense + 1 of the Ubiquiti APs, the Cisco SG-100, and the ISP's equipment), plug everything back in, and everything comes back up at full speed.
However, at times that I have been able to be on-site, I've noticed that I'm unable to ping the gateway (pfSense) whenever internet goes down (10.0.0.1), while I am able to ping other internal devices, such as the printer located at 10.0.0.2.
Reviewing the pfSense dashboard, I've never seen traffic become saturated. We have a 100mb connection, so have plenty of bandwidth. No servers and no high-bandwidth applications are on-site.
Symptoms to me sound exactly like a Spanning Tree issue (we don't have any smart switches, although I do have a Cisco SG-100 at the core of the network.
I checked all our switches (we only have 3 throughout the building - none with more than 8 ports), and hand-traced all of the cables to make sure there are no physical loops, and make sure switches aren't plugged into each other multiple times.
Pfsense Dashboard Too Slow Download
So then I upgraded the pfSense hardware from 2.1.3 to 2.1.5, and upgraded the firmware on all 4 of our Ubiquiti UniFi wireless APs. I also didn't have a wireless controller running continuously, so I installed the software onto one of the staff PCs that is almost always on, so that the controller remains present.
(If you know anything about Ubiquiti UniFi, you don't have to have the controller running continuously, but I figured it wouldn't hurt)
Running a lot of pings earlier today from my own PC (Ubuntu) when the internet was slow, I saw a LOT of packet losses. I noticed that as I would run a ping to a particular external IP address, there would be a lot of packet losses at the beginning, but the longer I let ping run, the faster ping responses would be (and the more consistent / reliable).
Reviewing the Proxy Filter config on the firewall, I noticed in the Cache Management of the Proxy Server section that the Memory Cache Size was 32mb while the Maximum Object Size in RAM was set to 64mb. Realizing this could cause a problem, I increased the Memory Cache Size up to 256mb, and I turned off completely the Hard Disk Caching.
I'm hoping that'll help, but we'll watch the network over the next 24-48 hours or so.
(Update: This didn't seem to help. 5 minutes after I left, I got a call that the internet was down. So I came back and swapped out the pfSense device with a temporary Cisco Linksys router, and we'll see what happens).
Are there any other suggestions or things I should look into in troubleshooting this ongoing issue? 1 thought I do have is that the guy who moved all of the network equipment without asking me first could have pinched a cable. I replaced the cable from the pfSense device going to LAN, but that didn't help. Another thought I have is that there could have been a surge of some sort because of the storm, but everything in the network closet is behind a APC Surge Protector. Regardless, that was when the issues started.
I have WireShark, but I'm not entirely sure what to look for in a Packet Capture. Perhaps some pointers on what to do with a packet capture would be helpful too.
David W
Pfsense Dashboard Too Slow Lyrics
David WDavid WPfsense No Internet
2,39244 gold badges2828 silver badges5757 bronze badges