Amazon Kindle 3 ‘WiFi’ problems and pfSense

A few weeks ago I replaced my malfunctioning Netgear ADSL modem/router/firewall with separate pieces of hardware, the main one being an old PC running the BSD-based firewall ‘OS’ pfSense. After buying an Amazon Kindle 3 yesterday (the WiFi edition) I had some problems making it work.

While it connected to the Internet and allowed me to browse the web on its experimental browser or look a the Kindle Store, any books I bought would sit in a download queue with ‘Pending’ as their state. Also it took an incredibly long time for the device to register itself with Amazon to begin with, and any attempts to visit the Amazon website on the Kindle (such as http://www.amazon.co.uk/myk to set up my one-Click purchasing) resulted in an error message saying I couldn’t connect at this time.

It was very strange – web browsing worked, but the Kindle specific sites didn’t. However using a different WiFi device did.

To fix this problem I discovered in the pfSense settings for my WAN interface that an incorrect MTU had been entered (I think I did this myself in an attempt to fix a different problem I was having with my Internet connection in general). Clearing the box to allow the default to be used solved the issue and my Kindle now correctly synchronises itself with Amazon.

So if you have a Kindle 3, running version 3.2 of the Kindle’s OS and it doesn’t connect to a WiFi network correctly, meaning you can’t download books, check the MTU settings of your broadband router/firewall or whatever else gets you on the Internet.