Router rebooted and did not reconnect
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I received the following notification email this morning:
Notifications in this message: 1 ================================ 3:31:38 Bootup completeI received it at about 3:30am and 7:30am.
I also have an Omada controller for my TP-Link APs that said it went offline at these times as well as at 7:41am and never came back.
I am assuming that my router rebooted again at 7:41am and did not come back online.
The bad thing is I am wintering out of state and do not have physical access to the router. I also can't seem to OpenVPN or SSH.
Previously I had posted WAN interface does not renew after reboot because my router would not renew the WAN IP after upgrades or reboots. Could this be what is happening?
As I don't have physical access, I can't check, but I also had a problem with pfSense rebooting randomly?. Not sure if this is happening again and can't check until it is back online.
The unfortunate thing is my ring cams, Nest thermostat, basically everything we use to remotely monitor our home, is not working.
I have a friend who is going to drive by tomorrow, attempt to connect to wifi, login to my router, and then see if they can renew the WAN, but what if this isn't the problem. Anything else I can check remotely? If the issue is the WAN not renewing, will this "auto-heal" after a day or 2 when the TTL expires and it renews?
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Is this behavior (the reboots) consistent with a router that is dying? Or is that impossible to tell remotely?
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Impossible to tell remotely, especially when you can't connect to it.
You don't state what kind of hardware you have. Is it third-party hardware, or is it a Netgate appliance? If Netgate appliance, which one?
There have a few reported issues in the past with some of the smaller appliances and their power supplies. You can check over in the Netgate Hardware sub-forum.
Is the firewall on a UPS? Is it possible that AC power failed multiple times at your residence and that caused the firewall to shutdown unclean (meaning the disk file system could have gotten corrupted)? If that is the case, you can't see that, nor fix it, without having an active console session running during boot-up.
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@bmeeks thank you for the response. It is 3rd party hardware. I will ask in the hardware forum.
Yes, it is plugged into a Cyberpower UPS. It is possible the power was off for an extended period of time, but I would expect some of our other devices to have reported issues. Still, it is possible that the power was out long enough to deplete the UPS and then the power cycled in a way to cause the router to corrupt the drive. Like you said, won't know until I get physical access.
On the plus side, I should have config backups right? How difficult is it to move that config from one appliance to another?
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@ryanm said in Router rebooted and did not reconnect:
@bmeeks thank you for the response. It is 3rd party hardware. I will ask in the hardware forum.
Yes, it is plugged into a Cyberpower UPS. It is possible the power was off for an extended period of time, but I would expect some of our other devices to have reported issues. Still, it is possible that the power was out long enough to deplete the UPS and then the power cycled in a way to cause the router to corrupt the drive. Like you said, won't know until I get physical access.
On the plus side, I should have config backups right? How difficult is it to move that config from one appliance to another?
The Netgate Hardware sub-forum is primarily for Netgate appliances. There is another, separate Hardware sub-forum that is for generic hardware issues.
Backups would exist if you made them, but they don't happen on an automatic schedule unless you configure something. They do happen when you save a configuration change. So that is the closest to "automatic" that you have. But if your disk file system is actually damaged, you may not be able to recover or use any backup stored there on the local file system.
pfSense does include an automatic configuration backup service that saves the config to a cloud server maintained by Netgate. You configure that on the SERVICES > Auto Config Backup menu. The docs are here: https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/backup/autoconfigbackup.html.
The best way to handle backups is to get in the habit of ALWAYS saving off a
config.xmlfile each time you make a change. And save that file someplace that is NOT on the firewall itself. That way, you have a backup to use even if the firewall hardware itself is destroyed.Restoring from a configuration backup is dead easy. You can even do it as part of reinstalling the pfSense system. Search the Netgate documentation for the "how-to".
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@bmeeks The auto-config backup feature is what I was talking about. Hopefully I will be able to login and grab a recent config and install it, even if it is on a different device.
