I'm running pfSense on ESXi. My modem is bridged with the vSwitch that pfSense is on. Most of the time everything works fine but if I reboot the ESXi host then my PPPoE no longer connects. It will refuse to connect for several hours. No amount of rebooting can get it working again. The log shows the following:
May 30 11:27:24 ppp: [wan_link0] Link: reconnection attempt 97
May 30 11:27:24 ppp: [wan_link0] PPPoE: Connecting to ''
May 30 11:27:33 ppp: [wan_link0] PPPoE connection timeout after 9 seconds
May 30 11:27:33 ppp: [wan_link0] Link: DOWN event
May 30 11:27:33 ppp: [wan_link0] LCP: Down event
May 30 11:27:33 ppp: [wan_link0] Link: reconnection attempt 98 in 2 seconds
May 30 11:27:35 ppp: [wan_link0] Link: reconnection attempt 98
May 30 11:27:35 ppp: [wan_link0] PPPoE: Connecting to ''
May 30 11:27:44 ppp: [wan_link0] PPPoE connection timeout after 9 seconds
May 30 11:27:44 ppp: [wan_link0] Link: DOWN event
May 30 11:27:44 ppp: [wan_link0] LCP: Down event
May 30 11:27:44 ppp: [wan_link0] Link: reconnection attempt 99 in 4 seconds
During this time I am able to successfully connect from my desktop PC by creating a PPPoE connection in Windows, so it's not a problem with the ISP/modem. I am also unable to connect from other Windows VMs running on the same ESXi host (they just say Eror 651) so it looks like some kind of problem with ESXi not passing through PPPoE properly.
Has anyone experienced this and found a solution?