I’ve had a Forbidden router for some time now and for an upgrade I purchased one of the “2.5G M.2 b+M key Ethernet Card 2500Mbps RJ45 LAN Card Intel I225 Chipset”. After installing, and passing the NIC through, I realized Pfsense CE was insufficient for 2.5gbe.
I upgraded to Pfsense+ and got the NIC working at full 2500-base T full duplex. Then several months and I noticed my internet monitor registered 92 mb/s download for a full week (It should be 900mb/s).
While troubleshooting (and cursing Xfinity) I noticed Pfsense had autoselected the WAN interface to 100-base T full duplex. After changing the selection to 2500-base T, Pfsense cannot find the NIC. I waited and rebooted and waited but the NIC does not offer any connection to Pfsense+.
I switched the Ports assignments for WAN to a separate NIC port on a different card I also had passed through for WIFI and Ethernet separation. The WAN port performs at the correct gig speed, but the 2.5 NIC still only registers at 100-base T and cannot switch up to 2500 with out connection loss.
I am 99% sure this is a hardware issue with the 2.5gbe NIC and it needs to be replaced. But, has anyone else come across this issue, where increasing the speed of the NIC results in Pfsense+ not being able to identify the card?
If it is Pfsense+ being stubborn, is there a workaround? I have toggled the “disable checksum” option but that had no effect.
I had pretty good luck with Pfsense CE, but moving up to Pfsense+ it seems to be sluggish within the main screen and applying changed. Also, it often has connection issues. i.e. if the modem drops out the daemons cannot re-establish connection without a reboot.
Has anyone else noticed the same thing?
Thank you