website security problems
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It was just happening to me.. pfsense.org, duckduckgo.com.. the pages won't come up.
it happens regardless of the browser. i used firefox, but i tested it with edge as well.
in firefox, i disabled DoH because I want everything resolved in unbound. I have cloudflare setup for dns over tls and have the NAT forwarding rule in place as per the documentation. as of now i really don't have any rules set up other than the ones that pfsense installs by default with suricata and pfblocker.I just read that service watchdog can cause issues with suricata where suricata will need to restart but the watchdog causes a conflict, which i can understand, so needless to say watchdog won't be monitoring suricata or anything for that matter any more.
This is all really aggravating. i'm trying to teach myself how to read logs because it's even getting in the way of my trading platforms working properly. This was never an issue in the past.. now all of a sudden its all screwy.
thanks for you help!
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@jc1976 First of all, did you try what @stephenw10 recommended with disabling Squid, pfBlockerNG, and Suricata services ?
You can also save your current configuration as XML file, perform factory reset or clean install of pfSense, and then just use pure defaults and see what happens. Then you can start installing your packages and perform testing between each package install. If theres an issue with pfSense, which i highly doubt there is, this will help you pinpoint the problem and potentially resolve it.
Did you try accessing web sites from different machine / device ? If not, you should test that out too to rule out any potential problem with the OS. Windows system policies can cause issues like these.
If you dont have another machine to test with, you can download GNU/Linux like Manjaro or Linux Mint, make a bootable USB flash drive, boot your system into a live environment that has Firefox browser in it, and test it from there. No installation required, so your system and files stay intact.
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@nimrod
i disabled caching in squid last night and that made a huge difference.
I had caching enabled but i have the cache filesystem set as 'null' because i'm using an ssd.. i know, doesn't matter much these days but can't really tell a difference when caching is enabled vs disabled anyway..as far as other computers, my gf has her mac laptop and at first she was having issues and had to tether with her phone, then she came back to use my LAN for a meeting and it's been working ever since.
it comes and goes.. if i open DDG and do a search, it comes back with an SSL error..
i'm probably going to have to reinstall all the packages again, and just do as the normal guides suggest.. i originally had it set as suricata and pfblocker inspecting the LAN, and it was nice because it got rid of all false positives and pointless logging. but ever since then, i've had nothing but problems, even after redoing it all with suricata inspecting the WAN and pfblocker in its default state as well.
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We need to know what the actual SSL error is here.
I could easily believe this is pfBlocker/DNS-BL resolving sites to it's local VIP. That will show an SSL error but the cert error makes that obvious if you look at it.
Steve
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this is what i mean..
i uninstalled pfblockerng, deleting all settings as well so when i reinstalled it was to it's defaults.
i also restored suricata to it's defaults.neither are running at the moment because i can't get through to any sites. ddg.com will come up (sorta, but that's also problematic).
i also uninstalled firefox to it's entirety and reinstalled in it's default state.
I used Edge, my gf uses her mac with chrome, it's just really crappy.. if i go to speedtest.net, assuming the page even resolves, i get my full allotted speed. ping times are normal, around 12ms.i'm wondering if it's comcast... there was an outtage a couple weeks ago when this all started happening.. they got it up and running obviously, but i wonder if there's a config issue on their end with their routing?
what do you all think? this just doesn't make any sense.. i've NEVER had pfsense be so unreliable and problematic. even with all my screwing around, it always JUST WORKS... now its basically unusable..
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@jc1976 says right there was the problem is
That isn't a pfsense thing.
Firefox setting
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/https-only-prefs
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up until lately, i've never had a problem with it. ive had mozilla in https only mode ever since i knew the mode existed. on my pc at work, i have the same settings enabled and it works fine. also, that's just an initial screen. if i put www.amazon.com, the site resolves as it should. and this goes on for almost all sites.
the last 2 times i reinstalled pfsense from the ground, up, i use gparted to wipe out all partition tables. so, i know the install is completely fresh.
do you think it could be xfinity? a couple weeks ago we had an outtage and ever since then i've had issues.
as of now, my pfsense is doing nothing more than routing dns over tls traffic to cloudflare... THATS IT!. i disabled pfblocker, squid, suricata, got rid of watchdog.
this weekend i'm going to take a back up of the config from my other pfsense box at my family house. it's precisely the same dell optiplex 790 with an i7-2600 (with HT disabled).
Again, i REALLY appreciate your input! i absolutely LOVE pfsense! and i won't get rid of it.. i just need to figure out why i'm having so many issues with it all of a sudden. I wish i new how to read logs better..
the only other thing i question is the RAM. it's new and by crucial (16gigs).
16gigs of RAM should read 16384, however on my dashboard it reads 16201.
when i see my other pfsense box this weekend i'll be able to see if something is wrong. -
@jc1976 just to add, my other pfsense box has suricata running in inline mode whereas this one is in legacy.. always had problems with this one in inline, never in the other.. which is odd because the only difference between the two boxes is my current box has a quad port intel i340 nic, whereas my other has a dual port intel pro/1000. yes, hardware offloading has been disabled..
i dunno... i wish my GF wasn't living with me at the moment so i could focus on this when i get home from work.. LOL!
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You're doing it right : re installing with bit level destroying etc.
But then you fail :
Do Not import your saved backup configuration !Do these simple steps :
Install clean.
Assign LAN interfaces, activates DHCP where needed.
Assign a WAN and connection method.
Change the admin password.And now the critical thing : do nothing else.
No config import - do nothing.
Done !pfSense works out of the box.
Your issue is solved.
And you also know now what the issue was .... -
@jc1976 this was never a pfSense or Xfinity issue to begin with. The error you got was clearly a browser/plugin issue as i described in my first post in this thread. Just because you didnt have any issues before, doesnt mean that the issue was not there. Browsers and their plugins are constantly getting updated, and with those updates, their behavior changes as well. Previous versions could try to establish HTTPS traffic, and if they fail, they just continue to HTTP without you even knowing. This could be browser "security issue" so Mozilla decided to change this and warn you if HTTPS traffic is not possible, and force you to "accept the risks" before you continue.
There is no need to use gparted or any other 3rd party software to wipe partitions. pfSense installer is doing that by default. Im not sure why you removed pfBlockerNG, Squid and Suricata if you have more than capable hardware. Neither of those packages were causing the issue you had. You are just paranoid now for no reason.
You also said, and i quote:
"i just need to figure out why i'm having so many issues with it all of a sudden. I wish i new how to read logs better.."
What other issues are you having ?
As for the RAM memory, some amount of your total system memory is shared with onboard graphic card. This can be changed in BIOS. pfSense doesnt need much video RAM since its not running Xorg graphic server. Its all textual or web interface mode. Unfortunately some BIOS-es wont let you set this shared memory size less than 32, 64 and on some system even 128mb of RAM. If you want to overcome this issue, you need a dedicated video card, which is totally pointless since you have 16GB of RAM which is overkill anyway.
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This is not a RAM issue.
It's almost certainly a browser issue. That should be easy to check though by just using a different browser.
It could be a combination of things and that browser plugin is just revealing it.Like something is resolving those to a different page, maybe a warning or error, and your browser is showing that because it's http.
Steve
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What is funny is his example is showing https://amazon.com in the url address bar.
If you go to amazon.com via http or https it should be sending his browser a redirection.
Resolving amazon.com (amazon.com)... 205.251.242.103, 176.32.103.205, 54.239.28.85 Connecting to amazon.com (amazon.com)|205.251.242.103|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently Location: https://amazon.com/ [following] --2021-11-11 09:29:03-- https://amazon.com/ Connecting to amazon.com (amazon.com)|205.251.242.103|:443... connected.--2021-11-11 09:29:39-- https://amazon.com/ Resolving amazon.com (amazon.com)... 205.251.242.103, 176.32.103.205, 54.239.28.85 Connecting to amazon.com (amazon.com)|205.251.242.103|:443... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently Location: https://www.amazon.com/ [following] --2021-11-11 09:29:39-- https://www.amazon.com/ Resolving www.amazon.com (www.amazon.com)... 23.11.225.174 Connecting to www.amazon.com (www.amazon.com)|23.11.225.174|:443... connected.Notice the "301 Moved Permanently" and then the new www. url and following to that..
He could have something blocking something - and his browser is showing this error as a red herring because it doesn't know any better?
I would love to see a wget even - take the browser out of the equation.
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@stephenw10 said in website security problems:
This is not a RAM issue.
It's almost certainly a browser issue. That should be easy to check though by just using a different browser.
It could be a combination of things and that browser plugin is just revealing it.Like something is resolving those to a different page, maybe a warning or error, and your browser is showing that because it's http.
Steve
@stephenw10 not sure if you saw, but issue is already resolved. Check the post from @johnpoz. Issue is exactly what i described in my first post. Also, i never said it was a RAM issue. @jc1976 was wondering where did the certain amount of total system RAM go, so i explained him that system RAM is shared with onboard graphics.
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@nimrod I am not sure I would consider it "resolved" until we actually hear from the user that he has it working now.
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@nimrod said in website security problems:
@stephenw10 not sure if you saw, but issue is already resolved. Check the post from @johnpoz. Issue is exactly what i described in my first post. Also, i never said it was a RAM issue.
I realise. But @jc1976 suspected it might be and I was ruling that out.
Yeah, is that browser setting blocking the http redirect? Seems like that should happen over https but I've never dug too deeply into that.
Steve
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Im constantly getting notified that posts have been edited, i thought i saw he said issue was resolved. I scrolled back now, and i dont see it. Im sorry, my bad.
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Regarding trying this all out with a different browser and different computers, that was done.
i attempted the same thing with edge, and my GF is using her mac with chrome, she's having the same issues as well. She has two mac laptops (one for work, one personal), both have the same issue.
So, i'll make the change with firefox but as i said before, this wasn't an issue a few weeks ago and up until last night absolutely nothing has changed. last night i uninstalled, rebooted, reinstalled (as default) firefox and the issue is still there.
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@jc1976 said in website security problems:
and my GF is using her mac with chrome, she's having the same issues as well.
And again pfsense has ZERO systems to make such a notification to the browser - that error is a BROWSER thing.. Now its possible your filtering the 301 redirection, but I really don't see anything in pfsense that would do that.. Maybe some sort of IPS?
How about you do a simple fetch or wget.. Now www.amazon.com is going to resolve to something different than amazon.com as you can see in my outputs from wget..
If your browser is not seeing the redirection and tries to load https://amazon.com via 443 then yeah the cert could fail and your BROWSER would warn you about it..
edit:
But when you look at my test of https://amazon.com I get the 301 redirect over 443, and the cert is trusted, etc.. Maybe you have something wrong with your systems Trusted Certs?Here for example using debug on the wget I can see the ssl info, etc. and via that connection I get 301 that it moved to https://www.amazon.com
--2021-11-11 15:05:53-- https://amazon.com/ Resolving amazon.com (amazon.com)... 205.251.242.103, 176.32.103.205, 54.239.28.85 Caching amazon.com => 205.251.242.103 176.32.103.205 54.239.28.85 Connecting to amazon.com (amazon.com)|205.251.242.103|:443... connected. Created socket 3. Releasing 0x00005653b3975a30 (new refcount 1). Initiating SSL handshake. Handshake successful; connected socket 3 to SSL handle 0x00005653b3975b50 certificate: subject: CN=*.peg.a2z.com issuer: CN=DigiCert Global CA G2,O=DigiCert Inc,C=US X509 certificate successfully verified and matches host amazon.com ---request begin--- GET / HTTP/1.1 User-Agent: Wget/1.20.3 (linux-gnu) Accept: */* Accept-Encoding: identity Host: amazon.com Connection: Keep-Alive ---request end--- HTTP request sent, awaiting response... ---response begin--- HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Server: Server Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2021 21:05:53 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 179 Connection: keep-alive Location: https://www.amazon.com/ Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=() -
Mmm, that error you're seeing in Firefox is a specific firefox error. So what error do you see in other browsers? There are almost certainly some clues there.
Steve
