After a long while using an old, giant Pentium 4 server as my firewall/router/dhcp server, I upgraded to one of these little Qotom boxes. With a Celeron CPU and 4 Intel gigabit ports, it seemed like it should be good at doing the same job.
I am having some performance problems though, and I am in over my head trying to figure it out. Basically, remote terminals (ipads, etc) on wifi may have eventually a hard time connecting to web sites. Try again, and the connection is likely to go through. Once a connection is open, data comes through at the expected rate. (I do not know of a way to replicate this for testing with command line utilities. What's a CLI way to emulate loading a busy web page, and log all the results?)
I realize there could be a LOT of reasons for a browser getting hung up "Connecting..." I believe I have ruled out basics like router cables and DNS problems and wifi signal quality. And here's where it gets weird: I just rebooted the FreeBSD box, and thereafter connections on the various browsers on various gadgets all went through immediately as you would expect. I am expecting it to degrade over the next day or so.
The machine is FreeBSD 11, amd64 src, 2 GB RAM, a GENERIC kernel, runs isc-dhcps, ipnat, ipf, sshd, and that is about all. A slower FreeBSD 8 machine with the same config files did this duty for years without this trouble--though it had more RAM. My ipf ruleset is not too big, just a few forwarding rules for things like Xbox Live.
While I am open to any ideas, I find the fact that a reboot helped the performance of devices on the network to be an interesting lead. In this freshly rebooted state, all seems to be well. What could be failing over time?
Any ideas?
I am having some performance problems though, and I am in over my head trying to figure it out. Basically, remote terminals (ipads, etc) on wifi may have eventually a hard time connecting to web sites. Try again, and the connection is likely to go through. Once a connection is open, data comes through at the expected rate. (I do not know of a way to replicate this for testing with command line utilities. What's a CLI way to emulate loading a busy web page, and log all the results?)
I realize there could be a LOT of reasons for a browser getting hung up "Connecting..." I believe I have ruled out basics like router cables and DNS problems and wifi signal quality. And here's where it gets weird: I just rebooted the FreeBSD box, and thereafter connections on the various browsers on various gadgets all went through immediately as you would expect. I am expecting it to degrade over the next day or so.
The machine is FreeBSD 11, amd64 src, 2 GB RAM, a GENERIC kernel, runs isc-dhcps, ipnat, ipf, sshd, and that is about all. A slower FreeBSD 8 machine with the same config files did this duty for years without this trouble--though it had more RAM. My ipf ruleset is not too big, just a few forwarding rules for things like Xbox Live.
While I am open to any ideas, I find the fact that a reboot helped the performance of devices on the network to be an interesting lead. In this freshly rebooted state, all seems to be well. What could be failing over time?
Any ideas?