General Questions

Hello, I've been using IPCop for a long time and am finally trying to move over to m0n0wall.

I set up an old PC with 3 NICs in it, identical hardware (old HP Brio desktop) to the one I'm successfully running IPCop on.

I set up the basic firewall and am running it from CD boot/floppy.  I connected the LAN side to a switch and login to the router that way.  WAN is connected to my existing network.  I'm able to get on the internet and access m0n0wall iself, for a while.  Then, after some period of time (an hour or two), I lose all connectivity to the firewall on the LAN side.  I can no longer even connect to the firewall to configure it.  (I can login to the switch so that doesn't seem to be the issue).  Meanwhile, my firewall box is still connected to a keyboard/monitor and it seems like FreeBSD is still up and running; I can do the basic config there, so it doesn't seem like anything has crashed.  The only way I can get it to work again (for another hour or two) is reboot.

I looked for various settings such as DHCP timeouts or something but can find nothing obvious.  Am I missing something basic?  I tried the latest release version as well as a recent beta version from CD and they both behave the same way.  Thanks...

I've had this problem before a couple times. One time it was a bad NIC, and the other time it was blown up capacitors on the motherboard.

Some flaky hardware doesn't work well with FreeBSD, but works fine with Linux. Other flaky hardware doesn't work reliably with Linux, but works fine with FreeBSD. I've seen my share of both. What you may be running into is the first case.

First, try the usual - make sure your BIOS is up to date, and make sure you disable plug and play OS in the BIOS.

Second, try re-assigning your interfaces so your current WAN is your LAN, and vice versa. Then see if the LAN interface still drops offline. If the LAN interface stays up, but the WAN does not, you know there's something about that NIC that FreeBSD isn't happy with. If the LAN still drops, it could still be a NIC issue but it's more likely to be something about the machine itself.