yet Another out-of-swap-space issue

knight2f6

@johnpoz thanks John. I am with netGate support on a different thread and they are implying the same thing. So, I am thinking of RMA'ing the product and running it on my own hardware. what is your recommendation for CPU, RAM, SSD storage for someone who likes to play with different packages and run multiple packages simultaneously?
would this be a good option? t.ly/g_mV

rcoleman-netgate

@knight2f6 said in yet Another out-of-swap-space issue:

what is your recommendation for CPU, RAM, SSD storage for someone who likes to play with different packages and run multiple packages simultaneously?

As we noted in our reply to your tickets we do not support running those packages on the BASE hardware -- which is what you have -- due to the heavy writing that is done to the eMMC storage.

The 4100 is very capable of running the software, we just do not support the packages in TAC that you are running.

knight2f6

@rcoleman-netgate said in yet Another out-of-swap-space issue:

we do not support running those packages on the BASE hardware

Ryan, this implies that you do support running them on a "non-BASE" hardware. can you recommend a hardware that you have that supports running these packages? thanks

rcoleman-netgate

@knight2f6 I take it you did not read the link in my email:

This is the list of supported packages in TAC, and the limit of the support (if it is limited):

https://www.netgate.com/supported-pfsense-plus-packages

Missing from that list: ClamAV
Limited support but on the list: pfBlockerNG, Squid, Suricata.

That does not mean the PACKAGES cannot be run, that means there's either no or limited TECHNICAL support from Netgate TAC for those packages -- regardless of the level of TAC support you have (LITE, Professional, or Enterprise).

knight2f6

@rcoleman-netgate thanks

stephenw10

Here though you are exhausting the RAM so running from an SSD would not help directly. You still should run from SSD of course.

You would need to tun those packages more carefully to run them all. 4GB should be enough though unless you have chosen to load all the lists/signatures.

Steve

knight2f6

@stephenw10 thanks. I am actually running the bare minimal set of signatures. In the case of Suricata, I am only running the Fedora and nothing else. I have tried multiple configurations with same result. for most part on each package I only enabled the bare minimum settings. The memory never hits the 100%, it barely touches 80% before ClamAv crashes. See the original image.

I guess what I am not sure is how the system claims to run out of SWAP space if it still has 20% of free RAM. Unless of course, it runs out of the memory AND swap space in the 5 minutes interval that is between each sampling period for the graph. Although, I have looked at this graph multiple times during each crash and they all look the same. You would think out of the 12 or so crashes, one of them would show memory going down to 0.

stephenw10

Try running top -HaSP and the command line and see what's using memory.

skogs

The 4100 is certainly restricted in some of its capabilities, but it really ~should~ be capable of what you'd attempting...though clamd does eat quite a bit of extra...but I've got everything you've got running except for clam and I'm sitting at 15% of 8G memory usage...if I was restricted for 4G it would only be 30%.

soo...I have 8G because I had the same problem at 4G you have now. More RAM didn't fix it.

IIRC running suricata in anything other than 'Pattern Matcher Algorithm - Auto' will essentially slowly eat the system.
Maybe this is fixed in newer builds, but the older days any of the fancy tuning one might want to do pretty much did exactly the opposite of what one would expect.
Now that I've got suricata tamed...well the extra RAM just wastes electricity.

bmeeks

@skogs said in yet Another out-of-swap-space issue:

IIRC running suricata in anything other than 'Pattern Matcher Algorithm - Auto' will essentially slowly eat the system.

This +100

Never, ever, never touch the Pattern Matcher adjustment in Suricata or Snort!

I have contemplated removing that configuration parameter from the GUI package a number of times, but I elected to leave it just in case someone has gigs and gigs of extra RAM and wants to play around with it. But on average firewall systems, you never want to change it from the default. If you do, the result is likely to be voracious swallowing of RAM.

knight2f6

@bmeeks please qualify, what is gigs and gigs of extra RAM? 16, 32,, ... Just curious as I am planning my next hardware specs. thanks

rcoleman-netgate

@knight2f6 The more you put into it the less you will eventually get out of it. Loading the protections that are super uncommon or rare or you really wouldn't be a target for could make your system perform so slowly you'll realize that it's not worth the performance drop.

The bigger the list in pfBlockerNG the more RAM it consumes... but you probably don't need all that -- just a few nations and a few topic filters and leave it at that.

YMMV, of course, and this is not official advice but it is possible to force your firewall into submission and find it's use to be unbearable.

bmeeks

@knight2f6 said in yet Another out-of-swap-space issue:

@bmeeks please qualify, what is gigs and gigs of extra RAM? 16, 32,, ... Just curious as I am planning my next hardware specs. thanks

64 GB would be a starting point, and it goes up from there. Lots of other things can yield better performance improvements than tinkering with the Pattern Matcher algorithm will achieve, though. For example, having good NICs with multiple queues that the OS driver supports very well, having RSS enabled in the kernel and operating properly, and of course a multi-core high clock speed CPU. Tuning your ruleset and fiddling with core affinity settings in suricata.yaml can also help performance. But we are also starting to rapidly run out of pfSense territory and into special-purpose appliances with really fancy hardware (and the software to take full advantage of that fancy hardware) when you need to do these things.

And @rcoleman-netgate has a great point. It is very easy to pile stuff onto your firewall and overwhelm it. It's not always the best solution to run everything on the firewall itself. For home networks or small business networks, putting stuff on the firewall works (so long as you don't go wild). But as you get into larger networks with much higher volumes of traffic, splitting tasks off onto separate machines becomes a better solution.

Plus, installing lots of "other software packages" on your firewall drags in extra shared libraries and potentially a lot of exposure to new threats (via all those required shared libraries). This is particularly critical when the extra packages drag in something like Java (which UniFi Network Controller does). IMHO, Java has no place on anyone's firewall!

johnpoz

@bmeeks said in yet Another out-of-swap-space issue:

Java has no place on anybody's firewall!

Java has no business on anything to be honest ;) heheh

It runs on my unifi controller - but that is limited to my infrastructure vlan for the APs etc. and nothing else has access to it - nothing exposed to internet, and only I can access it from my management pc, etc.

And that is really the only thing that VM does - it just runs the controller software. No other anything is served off it, not even for local network.

rcoleman-netgate

@johnpoz Java has its business in my mug.

johnpoz

@rcoleman-netgate You wouldn't want that on/in your firewall either ;) hehehe

rcoleman-netgate

@johnpoz and that's the edited version! :D