"pcscd PC/SC Smart Card Daemon" ?

dereitz

I was investigating why my pfsense box was using over 6GB of "laundry memory" and additionally was using swap space and finally ran across this thread. Sure enough, pcscd was running on my box and was the culprit. Thanks to this thread, I was able to disable the service and immediately my memory usage went back to normal!

Another great catch by the community.. Thank you all!
-David

SjM

This is interesting.

2.5.2-RELEASE (amd64)
built on Fri Jul 02 15:33:00 EDT 2021
FreeBSD 12.2-STABLE

pfBlockerNG was starting cron jobs which didn't complete to the extent that it was consuming 100% of CPU time. Couldn't figure out what was going awry. I came across this discussion and saw the process pcscd was running on my system. After I killed pcscd the system is behaving as it should on about 4-7% CPU utilization!

Weird.

Next thing is how do I apply the patch to stop pcscd loading at startup? I don't seem to have the option to apply a patch under the system menu of pfSense.

mcury

@sjm Install this package:

Then apply the patch afcc0e9c97c1993ae6b95f886665fcb4375d26c7

SjM

@mcury laughing just discovered the very thing.

SjM

@mcury how many path levels do I need to strip? 1??

mcury

@sjm I left everything default settings..

SjM

@mcury pfSense is again purring along like it should.

Many thanks!

bluepill

Thanks for this thread - like others it has helped me a lot.

drees

Thanks, applying the patch and stopping/started IPsec fixed the issue for me.

Not sure how long it was going on, but I found two different pfSense boxes (a SG-1100 and SG-3100) with a site-to-site IPsec VPN with this issue. On the SG-3100, we were seeing weird delays/pauses in OpenVPN traffic. Logging in we saw high CPU load and found the characteristic large number of bzip2 processes compressing ipsec logs. On the SG-1100, didn't really notice anything, but did find that the snmp daemon had died.

PeteRage

Ran into this problem also. Disabled the daemon. My next step is to establish site-to-site ipsec tunnel. Is this pcscd required to establish an ip-sec tunnel?

SteveITS

@peterage said in "pcscd PC/SC Smart Card Daemon" ?:

Is this pcscd required to establish an ip-sec tunnel

No.

chudak

"pcscd PC/SC Smart Card Daemon" is gone in 2.6.0!!!

jimp

@chudak said in "pcscd PC/SC Smart Card Daemon" ?:

"pcscd PC/SC Smart Card Daemon" is gone in 2.6.0!!!

It's still there, just disabled by default. If someone needs it they can enable it.

chudak

@jimp that's what I meant :)

Thank you !