>> Have an OpenBSD firewall working in an office doing very straight >> forward NAT and some persistent VPN tunnels. >> >> Couple weeks ago, this firewall just stopped responding to any >> traffic. It was sporadic, as after several minutes it'd start going >> again. At that point it was a patched Sparc64 3.5. >> >> While trying to troubleshoot this, I started setting up a spare x86 >> PC with 3.7. I didn't get anywhere with the troubleshooting, and >> I'm now running OpenBSD 3.7, with the same config files, and I'm >> having this exact same problem. > > If two distinct firewalls, running different versions of OpenBSD/PF, > on two entirely different platforms and hardware are experiencing the > same problem, I would start to look at the common denominators. Bad > cable, switch behaving badly, etc...
I had the same problem a couple of years ago myself; it turned out the problem was a cable that went bad. It hadn't been touched since it was setup, so I kept thinking, "Well, it can't be the cable. It has worked for months and no one has touched it." After oodles of troubleshooting including different NICs, different switches, and ultimately different machines, it ended up being a bad cable. Grrr. Because of the arduous task of running a new cable (it must have traversed at least three time zones), I was reticent to even test it. Needless to say, once I'd run the new cable, life was grand. :-| Once you find out what the problem is, Chris, please post what the solution is. Good luck, Kevin S. -- http://www.ebiinc.com - background screening from EBI pre-employment checks for employers
