we have two Pentium III Xeon, OpenBSD 3.8 boxes running pf in transparent bridging mode on our primary and backup Internet links, which is currently fed via an OC-3 (155Mbps) connection to the Internet. On an average day we run 70Mbps/50Mbps (14K pps/13K pps) in/out.
after upgrading to OpenBSD 3.8 and swapping out our original SysKonnect cards for a single Intel Dual Port Gigabit Server Adapter, we've been experiencing a problem where the inside interface (em0) stops transmitting, but continues to receive traffic - verified via tcpdump output on the interface. when this occurs, the output of an 'ifconfig em0' shows the OACTIVE flag set on em0. the only way to get the box to continue bridging (and passing traffic) is to manually bring the interface down and up via ifconfig - which also clears the OACTIVE flag from the interface. the frequency of occurrence is anywhere from every few hours to every couple days and I am unable to correlate it with a burst of traffic based on Cricket graphs. nothing of relevance appears in the /var/log/*. anyone running in a similar setup seen this behavior with the em driver under OpenBSD 3.8? I cannot verify whether this behavior occurs with earlier versions of OpenBSD, as I just upgraded the cards at app! roximately the same time I upgraded to 3.8. thanks much... ----- Gabriel Kuri | Sr. Network Analyst Instructional and Information Technology Division California State Polytechnic University, Pomona http://www.csupomona.edu/~iit | +1 909 979 6363