pfsense freeze

M0L50N

Hi,

One of my pfsense froze this weekend. Thats an old box I reinstalled with pfsense 2.6. AMD G-T40E Processor on SD Card! But everything working perfect since more than 1 month.

Yesterday it was freeze, Was able to connect to one camera remotely but 90% of networks was unreachable. I rebooted the router and everything working like before.

I want to know the reason. If these systems logs just before the router freeze tell you something, any help would be appreciate.

Mar 19 22:59:16 kernel (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): WRITE(10). CDB: 2a 00 01 5a 36 e0 00 00 80 00
Mar 19 22:59:16 kernel (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error
Mar 19 22:59:16 kernel (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): SCSI status: Check Condition
Mar 19 22:59:16 kernel (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): SCSI sense: NOT READY asc:ff,ff (Vendor Specific ASC)
Mar 19 22:59:16 kernel (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): Info: 0
Mar 19 22:59:16 kernel (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): Command Specific Info: 0xaa5500
Mar 19 22:59:16 kernel (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): Retrying command (per sense data)

thanks!

fireodo

@m0l50n said in pfsense freeze:

Mar 19 22:59:16 kernel (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): WRITE(10). CDB: 2a 00 01 5a 36 e0 00 00 80 00
Mar 19 22:59:16 kernel (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error

Looks like your SD-Card is dying ...

stephenw10

Yup that. Unless you took steps to prevent it (disabled SWAP, enabled RAM disks) it probably burned through the write cycles on the SD card.

Steve

M0L50N

@stephenw10

I have enough RAM available. Do you think I have to change the SD Card or just disable SWAP and enable RAM disks will do the job?

stephenw10

If you are going to run from SD card you should do everything you can to minimise writes.

That means removing SWAP. It shouldn't be used anyway but if something else is misconfigured and ends up using all the RAM so the SWAP starts to be used it will write a lot.
Enable RAM drives.
Use UFS not ZFS.

I'm kind of surprised that card is still functioning if it did hit a write cycle limit so it may not have been that. In which case you might be able to continue using it but you should still do those things now.

Steve

M0L50N

@stephenw10
Can you help me how to enable RAM Drives and use UFS not ZFS?

Why use UFS rather than ZFS??? what is the difference?

If I change the SdCard for a SSD mSATA, do I have to do that?

stephenw10

ZFS generates more drive writes and if you're running from an SD card you need to reduce that as much as possible.

Running from mSATA is better in just about every way! You can just use a regular ZFS install there.

Steve

M0L50N

@stephenw10
Does it say to you the same diagnostic? SD card is dying? The problem come back this night!

Mar 21 11:15:42	nginx		2022/03/21 11:15:42 [crit] 68576#100526: *2204 SSL_write() failed (13: Permission denied) while processing HTTP/2 connection, client: 10.8.8.2, server: 0.0.0.0:443
Mar 22 06:46:14	kernel		(da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): WRITE(10). CDB: 2a 00 00 f6 d9 20 00 00 08 00
Mar 22 06:46:14	kernel		(da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error
Mar 22 06:46:14	kernel		(da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): SCSI status: Check Condition
Mar 22 06:46:14	kernel		(da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): SCSI sense: NOT READY asc:ff,ff (Vendor Specific ASC)
Mar 22 06:46:14	kernel		(da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): Info: 0
Mar 22 06:46:14	kernel		(da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): Command Specific Info: 0xaa5500
Mar 22 06:46:14	kernel		(da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): Retrying command (per sense data)

I'm going in the same way ... I will mount another old pfsense identical with a mSATA and restore the backup ... I hope I will have a better exprience (I'm almost certain)

with mSTATA, am I better enable RAM Drive anyway?

Thanks again!

stephenw10

@m0l50n said in pfsense freeze:

with mSTATA, am I better enable RAM Drive anyway?

Not really. It reduces writes but also prevents using some packages and saving crash reports and your will lose some log data in the event of a power outage.
With an SSD the drive writes should not be an issue anyway.

Steve