ED HAYES

A long while back I built a ZOTAC Zbox (ZBOX-CI323NANO-U) to run PFSense and act as my router. For the most part, it has worked pretty well.  The features are great, without any of the gimmicky stuff you’d find on a consumer router. It’s also a lot more upgradable than a consumer router.

One problem though, on occasion I’d have to restart the ZBOX when the internet would stop working. The display I had connected to the PFSense machine said this during a failure:

re1: watchdog timeout

Each time the error occurred, I would hunt around the internet for a few minutes to find a solution, but I was never able to find one. I gave up for a while. But recently I took a deeper dive.

I found some pages blaming the default network adapter drivers and how they don’t work well with realtek adapters. I also found this page announcing new realtek drivers. I’ve dabbled with Linux a bit, but I’d still consider myself pretty novice. It was pretty difficult for me to get the drivers copied over to the machine, and then installed.

Here’s the process I followed to get them installed:

1. Download drivers
2. Extract ZIP file
   1. I put mine on my desktop.
3. Identify the IP address of your PFSense Router
4. Open terminal
5. Change directory to the desktop of your local machine
   1. Command “cd” will change directory
   2. Opening the terminal on a Mac should put you into your user’s home director. So “cd desktop” should bring you to the desktop as your working directory, and where the file is located

      cd desktop

6. Copy the file with the SCP command.
   1. Make sure to use the “root” username, not “admin”, for the target.
   2. When entering a directory structure “..” will go up, or back, one level.
   3. Default directory on target is “root” so that has to be changed to the kernel folder.
   4. My full command was:

      scp if_re.ko root@192.168.0.1:../boot/kernel/if_re.ko

7. You should get prompted for a password and then a progress indicator will show that the system is copying the file
8. Now, SSH into the PFSense machine; enter your password when prompted

   ssh admin@192.168.0.1

9. Enter “8” to get to the shell
10. Change directory to the kernel folder
    

    cd ../boot/kernel

11.  Modify the file

    chown root:wheel if_re.ko
    chmod 0555 if_re.ko

12. Open your PFSense admin page (192.168.0.1) in your browser
13. Go to Diagnostics -> Edit File
14. Location: /boot/loader.conf.local
15. Edit the file to look like this (if copy/pasting, replace smart-quotes with standard quotes):

    kern.cam.boot_delay=10000
    if_re_load="YES"

16. Save

During the process, I ended up replacing my loader.conf file with a blank new one. So if that happens, here is the correct details I got from a fresh install file (if copy/pasting, replace smart-quotes with standard quotes):

kern.cam.boot_delay=10000
autoboot_delay="3"
kern.ipc.nmbclusters="1000000"
kern.ipc.nmbjumbop="524288"
kern.ipc.nmbjumbo9="524288"
hw.usb.no_pf="1"

So far, I’ve had no problems! Wahoo for stable internet!