Solved for me. I have pfsense 2.4.5 on HP T620, two gateways from different LTE providers (VLANs). For a long time I've had a problem with unstable internet connection, traffic graphs looked like hundreds of spikes. I revieved settings: DNS Resolver/Network Interfaces - I checked only LAN and Localhost, DNS Resolver/Outgoing Network Interfaces - I checked only my two WAN interfaces, General Setup - I put two DNS addresses (adguard), DHCP Server/LAN/Servers - I put only one address, this is my LAN interface of pfSense. This helped. Thank you for video and for all comments. This was helpful.
I have just fixed this issue on my virgin media setup with pfsense. For me it was the unbound DNS server taking up to 60% of my traffic. Try changing to Bind in pfsense or pihole. I would be interested to hear if this fix works for outher people.
@@garethwhite7663 is this only a solution if you are using pfsense? I have packet loss happening on a very measurable pulse but I dont think I have any firewalls other than maybe whats on the Hub 3 already and I defo keep my walls fairly low in windows.
@@pauliedontsurf i would check to see if you are sending lots of dns traffic. It was a fault in my default installation of Pfsense that caused massive amounts of dns requests. It could be some protection in the vm network against dns floods. Let me know if you find anything.
Hi, I bumped across this when searching "Virgin & pfsense" for a supposed TFTP vulnerability...... A question please... I have only ever had pfsense handle my DNS so that pfblocker can do it's thing.... Am I losing something by not having Google or Cloudflare in my DNS too? I've not sensed any "loss".... Just looking to learn! TBH, I've had nothing but good things with my Virgin in modem mode and pfsense working together. Keep up the good work! Paul.
Thanks Paul. Google or Cloudflare DNS servers can be used as your upstream resolvers rather than your ISP DNS. Your local resolution still resolves locally and uses pfBlocker, it just normally uses your ISP DNS if your WAN is DHCP. I normally specify a Google DNS as the primary and ISP DNS as the secondary for upstream resolution. I always keep the local DHCP scope as the pfSense for DNS resolution for all clients which means it uses pfBlocker to filter out any undesirable domains/IPs. Some devices on your network are hardcoded with their own DNS (Amazon Firestick for example) so unless you intercept and do some clever redirection (which I've not worked out yet) those kind of devices will always bypass the pfSense/pfBlocker lookups.
I've been doing very well with pfSense. I use a SANS firewall audit and Reset All States once or twice per day. Resetting states tells your devices that their old connections are no longer valid. It fixes a lot of packet loss for me. Also, there are outbound uPnP options for Xbox NAT now.
SANS firewall audits block Windows from communicating with other devices on the network on ports 136-138, which can be pretty nefarious to latency, as well as multicast IOT packets from smart TVs like Samsung on port 15600.
Niggling issue for me is setting up an IPv6 monitoring IP. When I enter CloudFlare IPv6 DNS, my pfSense shows my IPv6 WAN Gateway as "Pending." Any suggestions?
I have just fixed this issue on my virgin media setup with pfsense. For me it was the unbound DNS server taking up to 60% of my traffic. Try changing to Bind in pfsense or pihole. I would be interested to hear if this fix works for outher people.
Any ideas on the best provider for fast paced gaming in the North of England please? Search everywhere with false wording that doesn't cover latency or gaming performance, any help much appreciated 👏
Have exactly the same symptoms but unfortunately am already running the latest PFSense+ software v21.05.2 which is their 'factory' version based off PFSense 2.5. Would really like to know what the underlying issue was/is. I have the Virgin Business 500MB connection so I can't put the virgin box back to router mode. Anyone else still see this apart from me?
I'm not sure, but if you'd like a copy of pfSense-2.4.5-p1 then you can download a copy from: frimley-computing.com/content/pfSense-CE-2.4.5-P1.iso.zip
Hasn't fixed a thing. My setup was very close to yours anyway - but I decided to go through the video, literally step by step, took your config like-for-like, and my latency and losses are still remaining. Throughout the video I thought "I can't see how this could help" - and very sadly I was right. :( I'm glad it worked for you, but it hasn't worked in my case. Back to the drawing board of diagnostics I guess!!
Have you upgraded to the latest stable release of 2.4.5-RELEASE-p1 rather than beta? 2.4.5-p1 seems to have cured 99% of my niggles and packet loss & latency hasn't been seen on our system since. Virgin have always proved very unhelpful in my diagnostics, but rightly so as it was all down to my version of pfSense. Hope you can progress...
@@FrimleyComputing Yes -been with pfSense following the release builds to a new device with AES-NI up to 2.4.5 - I can't remember exactly when the problems manifested but changed to the nightly builds a good few months ago for no other reason than 'why not' - but haven't seen a change. I don't see the issue when directly connected to the external interface, so it has to be an issue / misconfig / incompatibility between my PF and my VM SH3. Agree with you that it's not VM's problem to fix.
take a guess virgin lags so much worse for gamers ,, your thinking rubbish hub or maybe outdates cables ,, nope biggest problem is for us in the UK is that there DNS servers that were stuck will are located in the neverlands
I've had no issues since moving to 2.5. Update the daily snapshots until you find one where it works and then move no further. Future snapshots may break things so don't run 2.5 in a production environment. I'm using 2.5 at home and since it's cured I've not updated to a new snapshot. I'll now wait for the official release and then move to that.
I've been following your packet loss videos closely thinking it's not hardware issues, i will probably just go back to Synology router.. somehow I think it's virgin issue with Pfsense possibly as it's been fine on the Synology router my problems worsened with 2.5.. Anyway thanks for these videos and updates Very 👌 helpful and useful
Any tips I can apply just with hub 3 I get terrible Fifa gameplay on Xbox and high jitter, Anything you can possibly advise me to do as o do t have access to pf sense any help appreciated
I would recommend getting a decent router, putting the Virgin hub into modem mode and use the new router to provide your WiFi and wired network in your home. If you don't have any wired network devices and everything is using WiFi then you could also use something like Tenda Mesh WiFi which works really well.
I had virgin 350mb 12 months ago and only purchased it for ps4 gaming, had good downloads and upload but packet loss was constant so changed back to sky as never have packet loss with them. Going from 350mb to 70mb hurt alot. Im out of contract again now and wish to get the 500mb virgin for pc gaming this time.. if I get packet loss on that too is there any chance you can help me solve it?
70Mb should be more than OK for gaming, however Virgin at 500Mb would give you great download speeds if you're downloading content. For gaming, as you mention you need low latency and all ISPs do suffer occasionally with high ping responses when their networks are busy. I would say that it's definitely worth putting your Virgin hub into modem mode and then using your own router. Something like this would work really well ==> www.ebuyer.com/612957-netgear-nighthawk-ac1900-smart-wifi-router-r7000-r7000-100uks
@@FrimleyComputing thank you for your reply. Would the above modem be worth buying and decrease packet loss and layency if im only using Ethernet cable from modem to pc? I live alone and only have pc connected to Internet basically
@@robsmith2625 Hi Rob, What you could do is to set up a broadband monitor at www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality which would show you latency and packet loss. If you're seeing higher wild spikes and high latency then that gives you some data to talk to your ISP about resolving. I'm on Virgin with a 200Mb download & 19Mb upload connection and our 22yr old plays xbox online with his mates and we hear no grumbles from him! Our setup is Virgin hub 3 (modem mode) with pfSense router/firewall and BT Whole home mesh WiFi that covers the whole house. I can't say whether the recommended Netgear router would work in your instance because it all depends on the quality of your Internet connection, however I do know that when we used the Virgin Hub 3 in router mode we had lots of problems. I hope that helps and happy to help you if you have any issues (should you go with Virgin). I should point out also that you don't need 500Mb internet for gaming. You can happily game on a slower connection if the upload speed is around 5Mb+. Gaming just needs low latency to prevent any stutters or lag.
@@FrimleyComputing hey, wondering how to get the lowest latency gaming. Do you just recommend buying a separate router and just using modem mode? My hub4 1gb/s is awful, packet loss ect. Just need lowest latency and no packet loss.
@@user-yu4ps3rh3p I would definitely recommend using modem mode with any VM hub - they're awful... BUT before spending money on a super duper router I'd test the connection just using a laptop connected via DHCP on the ethernet port and make sure it gets a public IP from VM. Once it does then I'd run some continuous ping tests against a variety of hosts and make sure the TTL is not all over the place. If it's low and fairly constant, then you should be good to buy that fancy router! 🙂
Solved for me. I have pfsense 2.4.5 on HP T620, two gateways from different LTE providers (VLANs). For a long time I've had a problem with unstable internet connection, traffic graphs looked like hundreds of spikes. I revieved settings: DNS Resolver/Network Interfaces - I checked only LAN and Localhost, DNS Resolver/Outgoing Network Interfaces - I checked only my two WAN interfaces, General Setup - I put two DNS addresses (adguard), DHCP Server/LAN/Servers - I put only one address, this is my LAN interface of pfSense. This helped. Thank you for video and for all comments. This was helpful.
Been getting Packet Loss and high latency since November. Had engineers come over done nothing one laughed about. Utter disgrace of a company
I have just fixed this issue on my virgin media setup with pfsense. For me it was the unbound DNS server taking up to 60% of my traffic. Try changing to Bind in pfsense or pihole. I would be interested to hear if this fix works for outher people.
Gareth White just finally seen you’re reply will look into it thanks
@@Pac_2o12 Let me know how you get on. Would be interested if you have the same problems as me.
@@garethwhite7663 is this only a solution if you are using pfsense? I have packet loss happening on a very measurable pulse but I dont think I have any firewalls other than maybe whats on the Hub 3 already and I defo keep my walls fairly low in windows.
@@pauliedontsurf i would check to see if you are sending lots of dns traffic. It was a fault in my default installation of Pfsense that caused massive amounts of dns requests. It could be some protection in the vm network against dns floods. Let me know if you find anything.
TLDR upgrade to Pfsense 2.5
Save yourselves 15 minuets
Great informative content, looking to move to pfSense on my 1Gig VM, thank you - subbed :)
Hi, I bumped across this when searching "Virgin & pfsense" for a supposed TFTP vulnerability...... A question please... I have only ever had pfsense handle my DNS so that pfblocker can do it's thing.... Am I losing something by not having Google or Cloudflare in my DNS too? I've not sensed any "loss".... Just looking to learn!
TBH, I've had nothing but good things with my Virgin in modem mode and pfsense working together.
Keep up the good work! Paul.
Thanks Paul. Google or Cloudflare DNS servers can be used as your upstream resolvers rather than your ISP DNS. Your local resolution still resolves locally and uses pfBlocker, it just normally uses your ISP DNS if your WAN is DHCP. I normally specify a Google DNS as the primary and ISP DNS as the secondary for upstream resolution. I always keep the local DHCP scope as the pfSense for DNS resolution for all clients which means it uses pfBlocker to filter out any undesirable domains/IPs. Some devices on your network are hardcoded with their own DNS (Amazon Firestick for example) so unless you intercept and do some clever redirection (which I've not worked out yet) those kind of devices will always bypass the pfSense/pfBlocker lookups.
I've been doing very well with pfSense. I use a SANS firewall audit and Reset All States once or twice per day. Resetting states tells your devices that their old connections are no longer valid. It fixes a lot of packet loss for me. Also, there are outbound uPnP options for Xbox NAT now.
SANS firewall audits block Windows from communicating with other devices on the network on ports 136-138, which can be pretty nefarious to latency, as well as multicast IOT packets from smart TVs like Samsung on port 15600.
Niggling issue for me is setting up an IPv6 monitoring IP. When I enter CloudFlare IPv6 DNS, my pfSense shows my IPv6 WAN Gateway as "Pending." Any suggestions?
I'm switching to ATAT now, because it has super fast internet
Did you enabled DNS override on in the setup? Because on my setup I didn’t have to do this and make sense
I have just fixed this issue on my virgin media setup with pfsense. For me it was the unbound DNS server taking up to 60% of my traffic. Try changing to Bind in pfsense or pihole. I would be interested to hear if this fix works for outher people.
Any ideas on the best provider for fast paced gaming in the North of England please? Search everywhere with false wording that doesn't cover latency or gaming performance, any help much appreciated 👏
Have exactly the same symptoms but unfortunately am already running the latest PFSense+ software v21.05.2 which is their 'factory' version based off PFSense 2.5.
Would really like to know what the underlying issue was/is.
I have the Virgin Business 500MB connection so I can't put the virgin box back to router mode.
Anyone else still see this apart from me?
I'm not sure, but if you'd like a copy of pfSense-2.4.5-p1 then you can download a copy from: frimley-computing.com/content/pfSense-CE-2.4.5-P1.iso.zip
Hasn't fixed a thing. My setup was very close to yours anyway - but I decided to go through the video, literally step by step, took your config like-for-like, and my latency and losses are still remaining. Throughout the video I thought "I can't see how this could help" - and very sadly I was right. :( I'm glad it worked for you, but it hasn't worked in my case. Back to the drawing board of diagnostics I guess!!
Have you upgraded to the latest stable release of 2.4.5-RELEASE-p1 rather than beta? 2.4.5-p1 seems to have cured 99% of my niggles and packet loss & latency hasn't been seen on our system since. Virgin have always proved very unhelpful in my diagnostics, but rightly so as it was all down to my version of pfSense. Hope you can progress...
@@FrimleyComputing Yes -been with pfSense following the release builds to a new device with AES-NI up to 2.4.5 - I can't remember exactly when the problems manifested but changed to the nightly builds a good few months ago for no other reason than 'why not' - but haven't seen a change. I don't see the issue when directly connected to the external interface, so it has to be an issue / misconfig / incompatibility between my PF and my VM SH3. Agree with you that it's not VM's problem to fix.
Do you mean pfsense version 2.4.5? I don't think 2.5 is out yet. still a very helpful video, wandered why pfblocker wasn't blocking anything.
No, I meant 2.5, it's available as daily snapshots and has completely eliminated our packet loss and latency.
@@FrimleyComputing Thx, I'll give it a try if have any issues with VM.
take a guess virgin lags so much worse for gamers ,, your thinking rubbish hub or maybe outdates cables ,, nope biggest problem is for us in the UK is that there DNS servers that were stuck will are located in the neverlands
Have you had any issues since?
I've had no issues since moving to 2.5. Update the daily snapshots until you find one where it works and then move no further. Future snapshots may break things so don't run 2.5 in a production environment. I'm using 2.5 at home and since it's cured I've not updated to a new snapshot. I'll now wait for the official release and then move to that.
I've been following your packet loss videos closely thinking it's not hardware issues, i will probably just go back to Synology router.. somehow I think it's virgin issue with Pfsense possibly as it's been fine on the Synology router my problems worsened with 2.5..
Anyway thanks for these videos and updates Very 👌 helpful and useful
Any tips I can apply just with hub 3 I get terrible Fifa gameplay on Xbox and high jitter,
Anything you can possibly advise me to do as o do t have access to pf sense any help appreciated
I would recommend getting a decent router, putting the Virgin hub into modem mode and use the new router to provide your WiFi and wired network in your home. If you don't have any wired network devices and everything is using WiFi then you could also use something like Tenda Mesh WiFi which works really well.
@@FrimleyComputing many thanks for reply and you help
I had virgin 350mb 12 months ago and only purchased it for ps4 gaming, had good downloads and upload but packet loss was constant so changed back to sky as never have packet loss with them. Going from 350mb to 70mb hurt alot. Im out of contract again now and wish to get the 500mb virgin for pc gaming this time.. if I get packet loss on that too is there any chance you can help me solve it?
70Mb should be more than OK for gaming, however Virgin at 500Mb would give you great download speeds if you're downloading content. For gaming, as you mention you need low latency and all ISPs do suffer occasionally with high ping responses when their networks are busy. I would say that it's definitely worth putting your Virgin hub into modem mode and then using your own router. Something like this would work really well ==> www.ebuyer.com/612957-netgear-nighthawk-ac1900-smart-wifi-router-r7000-r7000-100uks
@@FrimleyComputing thank you for your reply. Would the above modem be worth buying and decrease packet loss and layency if im only using Ethernet cable from modem to pc? I live alone and only have pc connected to Internet basically
@@robsmith2625 Hi Rob, What you could do is to set up a broadband monitor at www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality which would show you latency and packet loss. If you're seeing higher wild spikes and high latency then that gives you some data to talk to your ISP about resolving. I'm on Virgin with a 200Mb download & 19Mb upload connection and our 22yr old plays xbox online with his mates and we hear no grumbles from him! Our setup is Virgin hub 3 (modem mode) with pfSense router/firewall and BT Whole home mesh WiFi that covers the whole house. I can't say whether the recommended Netgear router would work in your instance because it all depends on the quality of your Internet connection, however I do know that when we used the Virgin Hub 3 in router mode we had lots of problems. I hope that helps and happy to help you if you have any issues (should you go with Virgin). I should point out also that you don't need 500Mb internet for gaming. You can happily game on a slower connection if the upload speed is around 5Mb+. Gaming just needs low latency to prevent any stutters or lag.
@@FrimleyComputing hey, wondering how to get the lowest latency gaming. Do you just recommend buying a separate router and just using modem mode? My hub4 1gb/s is awful, packet loss ect. Just need lowest latency and no packet loss.
@@user-yu4ps3rh3p I would definitely recommend using modem mode with any VM hub - they're awful... BUT before spending money on a super duper router I'd test the connection just using a laptop connected via DHCP on the ethernet port and make sure it gets a public IP from VM. Once it does then I'd run some continuous ping tests against a variety of hosts and make sure the TTL is not all over the place. If it's low and fairly constant, then you should be good to buy that fancy router! 🙂
Ant got a clue what you're talking about🙃🙃🙃🙃