pfSense

If my WAN connection gets unplugged, or even if the DSL modem loses power or reboots, the pfSense GUI rapidly becomes unusable, eventually producing 504 Bad Gateway errors.

While I do have one of the notorious hme(4) cards in my system, that card doesn't exhibit the freeze-on-carrier-loss problem, but the em(4) card running the WAN interface does!

The solution is to reboot the firewall; restarting the Webconfigurator from the console does not bring it back.

Other than the GUI, firewall operation seems unaffected.

The firewall is a Dell PowerEdge 1750, recently upgraded to 2.3, which is when I started seeing this behaviour.

• Welcome to pfSense 2.3-RELEASE-pfSense (i386) on remote ***
  MTSDSL (wan) -> em0 -> v4/DHCP4: 205.200.228.xxx/22

dmesg|grep em0:
em0: <Intel(R) PRO/1000 Legacy Network Connection 1.1.0> port 0xdce0-0xdcff mem 0xfcf20000-0xfcf3ffff,0xfcf00000-0xfcf1ffff irq 20 at device 4.0 on pci1
em0: Ethernet address: 00:02:b3:d7:6c:6b
em0: netmap queues/slots: TX 1/256, RX 1/256
em0: link state changed to UP
em0: promiscuous mode enabled
em0: link state changed to DOWN
em0: link state changed to UP

I'll be happy to provide uncensored configs directly if needed.