On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 8:10 PM, Richard
Parvass<richard dot parvass at aaland dot co dot uk> wrote:
> During heavy traffic, I get the following errors logged a few times over a
> short period, then the network connection, despite being "up" is not
> responding and no traffic passes. This did not happen until a nightly
> offsite backup was put in place over the link. There is no way to throttle
> the traffic generated.
>
> kernel: vr0: tx shutdown timeout
> kernel: vr0: restarting
>
> Running ifconfig vr0 down; ifconfig vr0 up from exec.php restores network
> connectivity.
>
> It appears to be a bug within FreeBSD which was possibly fixed with a
> patch way back in v4.7, but the patch seems to have regressed in 1.3b15's
> FreeBSD which this system is running.
>

There are a number of edge case vr(4) issues in FreeBSD 6.x that
weren't fixed until 7.x. This is among them I suspect. m0n0wall 1.3
will be on 6.4, the following release will be on 7.x and should fix
that. In the mean time, it sounds like this is a serious problem in
your circumstance, so your best option for a quick resolution is
probably using pfSense. Putting a switch between that port on m0n0wall
and the device it plugs into might be a good work around since it
seems to be specific to half duplex connections.