@jrey @Gertjan
I wanted to provide update to these issues so you know what happened and in case it might help someone else. I left this thread partly because I didn't want to take up anyone else's time on what was becoming an increasingly complex and consuming problem.
It turns out this was 2 main problems:
After encountering what seemed like a cascading number of failures and problems, including a boot loop, I was able to verify bad hardware. Consequently the MB, CPU and RAM were replaced with new. The SSD and NIC PCI card did not seem affected.
There was indeed a misconfiguration with my account at the VPN provider. Specifically, any filtering at the VPN level was not compatible with DNSSEC. This included any filtering, including of malware, tracking or social sites. This filtering was turned off.
Some notes:
Before wiping out the SSD and in the old installation of pfSense, I did not use any backup files to transfer settings because it seemed likely to transfer misconfigurations as well. Instead I took screens shots of every page I may have modified from a default installation and used those to transfer most of my setup to the new default install of pfsense on the new hardware. Almost every setting that was to be changed from default was questioned and re-researched before doing so. In this process I came across VPN setup instructions from a competing provider that had more specific and complete instructions which included the warning that VPN filtering was not compatible with DNSSEC. Also, I was able to identify and eliminate a few crazy settings made in an apparently futile attempt to address the problems.
Yeah, WAY more than a couple of hours, LOL. But the bad hardware was a far bigger problem than I expected.
Everything now works as expected and DNS resolution, and everything else, is faster than it's ever been. In pfBlockerNG, error.log and py_error.log remain empty after a week or two of continuous use.
I want to thank @jrey and @Gertjan for your help which I have tried to heed. I do have fewer pfBlockerNG feeds thanks to @Gertjan .
And thanks and gratitude to @BBcan177 for creating such an awesome package.
Best Regards,
