Ethernet interface em0 frozen on startup

[Frank]

Hello.

This morning I had an issue with my Freenas server.
The main Ethernet card does not communicate with any node on the network.
I don't even see the mac address of the card in the commutation table of the switch on witch it's connected.
I have to stop it and start it again manually with the following command.

ifconfig em0 down
ifconfig em0 up

Sometimes I need to do it several time and in a different order (doing an "up" even if it's already up).
I noticed that even if I disconnect the wire status is still active in the ifconfig output.
Even after disabling network card status is still active.
But once it's started it never crashs.

Ifconfig output.

em0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
options=4019b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,TSO4,VLAN_HWTSO>
ether XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)
status: active
em1: flags=8c02<BROADCAST,OACTIVE,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
options=4219b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,TSO4,WOL_MAGIC,VLAN_HWTSO>
ether XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
media: Ethernet autoselect
status: no carrier
lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 16384
options=3<RXCSUM,TXCSUM>
inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x5
inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000
nd6 options=3<PERFORMNUD,ACCEPT_RTADV>
vlan200: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
options=103<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,TSO4>
ether XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
inet XX.XX.4.16 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast XX.XX.4.255
media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)
status: active
vlan: 200 parent interface: em0
vlan5: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
options=103<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,TSO4>
ether XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
inet XX.XX.0.1 netmask 0xff000000 broadcast XX.XX.255.255
media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)
status: active
vlan: 5 parent interface: em0

This is my configuration.
- Version :

FreeBSD freenas.local 8.3-RELEASE-p7 FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE-p7 #1 r249203M: Sat Apr 6 09:28:27 PDT 2013 root@build.ixsystems.com:/tank/home/jpaetzel/fn8.3/freenas/os-base/amd64/tank/home/jpaetzel/fn8.3/freenas/FreeBSD/src/sys/FREENAS.amd64 amd64

- Hardware configuration : 4 Gb of RAM, 3TB of disk space, Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1220 V2 @ 3.10GHz.
- Filesystem configuration : UFS.
- Ethernet card is configured with 2 vlan : 5, 200. (There is an ip address configured on both).
- This is hardware specifications about the Ethernet card :

em0@pci0:0:25:0: class=0x020000 card=0x11b71734 chip=0x15028086 rev=0x04 hdr=0x00
vendor = 'Intel Corporation'
class = network
subclass = ethernet

Any help will be much appreciated !
Thank you.

 

[Frank]

Hello.

I have something new today.
On startup in the boot process output I can see

ifconfig: create: bad value

I didn't notice it yeasterday.

Indeed, when I run the netif script located in /etc/rc.d/ I can see the same error.
I already tried to configure network interfaces from scrach by deleting it first and restarting freenas.

I read another post about this issue in this forum. Somebody asked for the content of the SQL table which contains network configuration. So here it is.

sqlite> select * from network_interfaces;
|XX.XX.0.1|nas|||0|8|0|vlan5|1

 

[Frank]

I found the solution.

I realized that I didn't configured the physical Ethernet interface em0. It does need to be configured with either DHCP or a fixed IP address. Otherwise it raises an error on startup (which is event not present in log files ...).
I didn't configured any ip address on it because it's useless knowing that I use only virtual network cards.

If it isn't correctly configured it seems to do not start. But in the ifconfig output em0 is active. So I've been a little bit disturbed.

Anyway I think it would worth putting error output from netif script file somewhere in log files.
Thanks.