I’ve been running an OPNsense router on a r210 ii for over a year and had no trouble until last week the WAN link just stopped working seemingly randomly. The link is on the same NIC as the LAN link which still is active and has the gigabit light on while the WAN port has no lights. After messing with it for awhile I discovered the link would come to life if I set it to use 100baseTX speed instead of the default of auto-negotiate but would also die if I tried to manually set it to 1000baseTX. When the link would start working again it was dropping ~60% of traffic.
Is this an indication that the port itself is damaged? Or could it be a driver issue that an update might fix? I’m not very familiar with the BSD tools so I’m not very sure how to get further diagnostics.
For further information I recently installed my first patch panel and made my first cables for the set up so could it be possible my crimping was bad and caused damage? To account for this I switch to a store bought cable and a direct connection to the Arris surfboard modem but it did not help.
Yeah try different cables. If you mess something like a twisted pair not making full contact the connection will drop down to the previous level so in your case this is 100baseT
I’ve tried a few cables with the same result. I have some cable testers that I’ll use the next time I have access to the server and see what that says. The part I found strange is that auto-negotiate doesn’t work at all when I would expect it to drop it to 100baseT
Verifying your port is still good should be your first step. Grab a small consumer dumb gigabit switch for like $10-$15 bucks if you don’t have one, and plug it in and watch the color of the LED. That would eliminate or confirm your port issues.
Another option is if you have an old laptop with a gigabit network port built in or a gigabit ethernet usb or thunderbolt dongle and a short factory made patch cable. That could help too in a pinch.
I connected the router and the modem to a switch to test them. The modem had a 1gb link while the router only had a 100mb link so it looks like the ethernet port is damaged. I’ll replace the card soon. Thanks for the help!