PSA to anyone using QOTOM box for router

[Rifter]

Cliffs:

Port 1 on box is eth0
Port 2 on box is eth3
Port 3 on box is eth2
Port 4 on box is eth1

FULL VERSION:

I bought a Qoto Q310G4 box for a pfsense router/firewall. Love it, its small, works good, uses almost no power when idle.

BUT......

It has 4 intel gigabit LAN ports, its one of the reasons i chose it. however they are not labled correctly....

Everything i read says default pfsense setup is WAN on 1st NIC and LAN on second NIC. So i hooked it up this way, installed pfsense. Install went fine, booted up, confirmed it was working from the console dhcp was active was getting WAN IP life was good. NIC labled 0 was WAN and NIC labled 1 was LAN. Hooked up network cables to ports 1 and 2(as is labled 1-4 not 0-3).

And nothing works on LAN side, PC's dont get IP;s, cant ping the pfsense box, wireless AP not getting IP. Nothing worked on LAN port of pfsense box. Since i was restructuring my network at the same time and installed a new switch i thought it may be bad and the issue, swapped out with known good switch. same issues. Figured might be cable, tested all cables, all were good. Spent a good 4 hours troubleshooting different hardware configurations for the network, nothing worked. Then turned to software, maybe something was wrong with the pfsense install, ended up reinstalling a total of 4 times, each time it went normal, said it was working.

Then in a act of pure desperation i tried the other 2 LAN ports... and found out that the ports are labled 1-4, but thats not the order the NIC's are connected to them internally.

Port 1 on box is eth0
Port 2 on box is eth3
Port 3 on box is eth2
Port 4 on box is eth1

So as soon as i plugged lan cable into lan port # 4 on pfsense box everything seemed to work fine, yay problem solved.

Then i spend 2 hours configuring the firewall, weird things started happening to some connected clients, and it turns out that the pfsense image i downloaded and put on a USB stick was corrupted, so i had to redownload reimage it to USB stick and resinstall pfsense for the 5th time. At least this time i knew which LAN ports were really which. And all is running great now. I cant even remember the last time i had a corrupt download thats why i didnt check it previous to install.

I was having a rough night last night, no luck....

 

[XavierMace]

Unfortunately that's not the way that works. eth0 is a name assigned by software. That generally stays the same across reboots, but OS updates can change the "order" of your ports. I've had that happen after a power outage as well.

 

[Rifter]

Unfortunately that's not the way that works. eth0 is a name assigned by software. That generally stays the same across reboots, but OS updates can change the "order" of your ports. I've had that happen after a power outage as well.

Wierd, i have another box with 4 NIC's, all different manufacturers in different slots. Thats stayed the same across several differnt OS's for longer than 10 years(all linux based though, pfsense is my first BSD build).

Perhaps only the ones with all NIC's coming from one chip like the qotom box change assignments, or its a BSD thing.

Seems stupid though to have to play musical network ports every time the power goes out

 

[XavierMace]

It's not common, but it does happen. I run Sophos UTM as a VM with one port on the host as a dedicated WAN port, and while back I shutdown my rack for maintenance. When I powered it back on, it had changed port. I couldn't tell you if there's other factors involved but I see people talking about it happening on Linux builds as well.

 

[PliotronX]

Well thats not cool. Good to know but lame.

 

[Zoinks]

This has been an extremely unreliable box for me. And yes, ports are physically 0,2,3,1. In BIOS you can manually blink the port LEDs. Pfsense has been extremely unreliable on it. Let me know how its been working for you...

 

[Rifter]

Has been rock solid after an initial issue of the corrupted pfsense install. Uptime of 28 days so far since last reboot.

Have a bunch of packages running too, squid as transparent proxy as well as caching, Snort, ClamAV, darkstat. And using it for VPN as well.

its been going good so far, Knock on wood

CPU stays at a steady 28-30C most of the time, hits into the 40's when using VPN. Box gets warm to touch but not hot, im happy for a passive heatsinked unit.

 

[Zoinks]

Are you using Suricata? Inline mode does not seem to work despite the Intel LAN chipset supposedly being supported by FreeBSD/PFsense. Can't figure that one out.

 

[Rifter]

Are you using Suricata? Inline mode does not seem to work despite the Intel LAN chipset supposedly being supported by FreeBSD/PFsense. Can't figure that one out.

Im using snort as im more familiar with it, i have seen suricata recommended more lately it seems to be the newer option with a few more features, i may look into it in the future but for now am happy with snort.