I had some issues with accessing IPMI in my pfSense build. It seemed like if I let pfSense boot up and I was not accessing IPMI at the same time, pfSense would take over the whole NIC and not let me access IPMI. I read here that this is normal to not be able to access IPMI once pfSense boots but that defeats the whole purpose of IPMI so I don’t think the system should behave in that way. After messing with it for a few days all I can say is IPMI seems really finicky when sharing a NIC, or maybe I’m doing something goofy.

I had planned on doing a dedicated IPMI NIC anyway so I bought a cheap Supermicro riser card RSC RR1U-E16. I then hooked my LAN to the Intel PCI-Express NIC that I connected to the riser card. In the BIOS I set a static IP for the IPMI NIC and it has been stable since. I would still recommend this combo for a low power firewall/router build.