Slow internet...

When you are working in the IT department, I guess "My internet connection's slow" comment is not uncommon. Nowadays people will notice first if internet goes down than when other system is down :)

It was my second week on my new job; everything was fine until that day when everyone screams “Internet’s slow!!” Since nothing was changed on the network and it’s a normal load in the network, my first thought was to check with the ISP, but they said nothing's wrong. The next thing I checked was the firewall interfaces’ settings and surprise…surprise… the interface that is connected to the Internet Corporate Gateway (ISP) was set to auto and it chose to set itself as Half Duplex.

Sure enough, collisions happened and turned the network to custard. In five minutes it has already had 194 collisions.

Next step was to change the interface setting which is another challange because we are using PFsense firewall that runs on FreeBSD. I wish it was Cisco... :)


Before changing the setting we need to be sure what the interface is capable of by running the command below

# ifconfig -m bge1
bge1: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        options=1b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING>
        capabilities=5b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,POLLING>
        inet 210.55.99.182 netmask 0xfffffffc broadcast 210.55.99.183
        inet6 fe80::216:35ff:fec3:c26%bge1 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2
        ether 00:16:35:c3:0c:26
        media: Ethernet 100baseTX <full-duplex>
        status: active
        supported media:
                media autoselect
                media 1000baseTX mediaopt full-duplex
                media 1000baseTX
                media 100baseTX mediaopt full-duplex
                media 100baseTX
                media 10baseT/UTP mediaopt full-duplex
                media 10baseT/UTP
                media none
Note: you need to replace bge1 with the interface you want to change.

After I am sure of the interface's capability, I can now change the setting by using this command below

ifconfig bge1 media 100baseTX mediaopt full-duplex

Everyone is happy again now...