Netgate 4100 won't boot without console
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Hi. The Northeast United States has had a rocky few weeks of winter weather, and my 4 month old Netgate 4100 seems to have the behavior that, without an active console session connected, it will not reboot on its own after a power restart.
I'm dubious of my own claim but it's the only data I have so far. Kind of tricky to debug since I can't access the system other than observing the hardware LED lights.
So my claim is, if the power flickers, my Netgate 4100 will turn back on, but will not activate the OS enough to have LAN access to it. If I connect a console and hit enter a bunch, I won't 'wake' it up. If I leave the console connected and restart the power of the Netgate 4100, THEN I will see the OS post and boot up. At this point the system is completely back online with no further interactions.
I'd like to believe I have a blind spot and it's not actually related to my interfering with an active console.
I had noticed on a few power outages so far, that simply restarting the Netgate 4100 manually was enough to get it to boot back up, but today I was not able to observe that.
It certainly seems reasonable to me that the device should not be expected to restart itself after what I call a 'power blip', which is like a sub-second black out (commonly experienced with hearing a 'pop' from the streets nearby. Yes, I live in a hilariously poor electrical situation).
With this all in mind, yes, I have stolen a small battery backup with surge protection and dedicated it to the Netgate 4100, and rather do expect not to experience this again so long as I keep it there. And the device is worthy of this and should have had it all along. So my question is really a curiosity for tribal knowledge, since even with a solution to this, I'm not taking the battery away from the device from here on.
Here's some properties:
Vendor: INSYDE Corp.
Version: CORDOBA-03.00.00.01-2Ct
Release Date: Wed May 4 2022
22.05-RELEASE (amd64)
built on Wed Jun 22 18:56:13 UTC 2022
FreeBSD 12.3-STABLEThanks. Admittedly this is one of the lowest quality questions I have asked and I'm not really even satisfied by the information I have.
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@digitalsushi I would expect devices to boot on short power outages...I suppose it depends entirely on the duration vs the capacity of the capacitors in the device.
I can't explain what you're seeing though. Maybe Netgate can help diagnose what state it's in by the LEDs, when this happens.
Does your device have ZFS? If not, powering off a running file system can cause file system corruption. If it is ZFS it will say so in the Disks widget on the dashboard.
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@steveits Interesting! Indeed, my / partition is zfs as sold to me by Netgate:
Mount Used Size Usage
/ 764M 12G
6% of 12G (zfs)I wonder if perhaps my interfering with the system using the console is allowing some default answer to escape my observation.
Even just knowing about the ZFS is a great new piece of information, and it now cements the criticality of having an electrical backup. Thank you!
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@steveits Heh, I didn't read very carefully. You said if it is NOT zfs then it can be risky.
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@digitalsushi yeah :)
https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/troubleshooting/filesystem-check.html
Either early 2021 or 2022 ZFS became the default, and I don't recall offhand when the 4100 was released. Probably after that.The other thing I have seen plenty of times over the years is that noisy/bad power can put hardware in a weird state where powering off is the only way to recover.
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@steveits Thank you very, very much for your time and your insights.
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Yes, when this happened what do the LEDs show?
Also, yes, if it was installed using a UFS filesystem then power outages like that can certainly cause booting issues. However we now install everything as ZFS by default.
Steve
