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    To schedule a reboot

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
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    • johnpozJ
      johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
      last edited by

      I would love to hear an actual use case that made sense for a scheduled reboot.. I can understand a scheduled standing maintenance window where you were allowed to take the system offline for a bit.  This is when you would do your upgrade that requires reboot, hardware upgrade/maint, new/change wiring, etc.

      I am curious to what sort of debugging needs a scheduled reboot as well??

      An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
      If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
      Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
      SG-4860 24.11 | Lab VMs 2.8, 24.11

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      • H
        Harvy66
        last edited by

        @kejianshi:

        Sometimes you just should give the customers what they are asking for and print a disclaimer on the product…

        The customer is not always right. That's called selling out. I've never had issue calling out bad ideas in my line of work. Most people appreciate my frankness. Of course if someone twists my arm, I'll give, but only have explicit warning that I take no responsibility for any issues that arise and if someone calls complaining their world is on fire Friday at 4pm, they're waiting until Monday morning. A few times I had to work weekends. But if I'm working 2 hours on Saturday, I'm taking all of Monday off and that will not count against my vacation time.

        A professional has a duty to make sure they don't enable customers to harm themselves.

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        • K
          kejianshi
          last edited by

          OK - So situation where the the evil scheduled reboot would have been useful.  I have a pfsense running in Florida. 
          It is the router for a friend but its also backup personal use VPN for me.  Went to use it because of a rare major outage caused by a storm recently took my main pfsense offline for 2 days.
          There was no one at the place in Florida to reset or reboot the machine but it was not able to be contacted by me from here.
          When someone was able to get to my machine, 2 days later (2 days too late), the internet was fine and it was routing fine.
          Apparently no problems right?  What happened is the WAN IP changed and DNS was not dynamically updated as it should have been.
          A simple reboot fixed it. 
          Now, it would be no inconvenience at all for anyone for this machine to reboot nightly at 4am.
          I know the real problem here was with the DNS not updating and if I geeked around enough I might be able to figure out some hack to make it more reliable.

          However - A reboot is so much more simple in this case.

          Its not best practice most of the time, but sure would have saved me some headaches this time.
          Also, I didn't invent the concept of having GUI options for scheduled reboots.  It was on other routers.

          Had the same issue with DD-WRT in the past and having it reboot kept it from being offline and uncontactable for days on end also.
          It was a mild aggravation at times for the few seconds it would go down and come back up but at least it wasn't gone for days on end.

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          • J
            jeffvfren
            last edited by

            I just found a reason why I have to schedule reboot the firewall.

            We having a problem today as pfSense corrupted, after reinstall and restore from backup config, people from outside access (for example VPN) seems very slow. But I can't simply restart it in day time, I need a reboot at 12am, and I want go to bed early  :'(

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            • C
              Chrismallia
              last edited by

              A reboot only masks the issue, It would be better to solve it

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              • A
                a_null
                last edited by

                I've done it, several times. I've set up a crontab from an ssh shell:
                30 06 * * * /sbin/shutdown -r now
                to reboot the firewall at 6:30 each morning. It seems to stick just fine until it's physically removed, and I've used it on several v2 versions, though I can't say specifically that I've done it on 2.0.x

                \x0

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                • superweaselS
                  superweasel
                  last edited by

                  I have to have pfSense reboot every 15 days to return performance back to normal. From what I have deduced this unsolved issue is the cause:

                  https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/4821

                  This is a great use of Cron job for rebooting.

                  pfSense rig: pfSense SG-4860/120GB SSD
                  WAN: CenturyLink Gigabit Fiber

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                  • M
                    mcdiesel
                    last edited by

                    Use case for reboot:

                    When making higher risk changes (usually on Cisco), one schedules a reboot for 15 minutes time. If you screw your changes and loose access, the reboot returns it to known good state. If they're successful, cancel the reboot.

                    pfSense (over many versions) gets a bit wobbly after assigning or de-assigning interfaces, especially WAN or interface carrying default gateway. I don't know why, I don't have enough foo to figure it out.  A reboot always clears it. pfSense can also be a bit naughty adding or deleting routes. If a route to the same place may have come from two different sources, it doesn't track which source, so deletes the route anyway, even if the route belonged to the other source (eg vpn vs static route)

                    Tonight I added a new interface for an open vpn endpoint to a remote instance, to use as a gateway, and after apply, boom, vpn went down and didn't come back.  Scheduled reboot would have been useful, not that I remembered to set one anyway.

                    ps pfSense is awesome, use it on all my sites.

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                    • R
                      rpsmith @johnpoz
                      last edited by

                      @johnpoz -- how about a memory leak in 23.01 on my SG-1100. Is that a good enough reason to schedule a nightly reboot until they release a fix?

                      Roy...

                      johnpozJ 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • johnpozJ
                        johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator @rpsmith
                        last edited by

                        @rpsmith said in To schedule a reboot:

                        how about a memory leak in 23.01 on my SG-1100.

                        And what redmine is that exactly?

                        An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
                        If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
                        Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
                        SG-4860 24.11 | Lab VMs 2.8, 24.11

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                        • R
                          rpsmith @johnpoz
                          last edited by

                          @johnpoz -- Memory leak might not be the correct terminology.

                          https://forum.netgate.com/topic/178023/1100-upgrade-22-05-23-01-high-mem-usage/13?_=1676880006434&loggedin=true

                          Roy...

                          johnpozJ 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • johnpozJ
                            johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator @rpsmith
                            last edited by

                            @rpsmith said in To schedule a reboot:

                            https://forum.netgate.com/topic/178023/1100-upgrade-22-05-23-01-high-mem-usage/13?_=1676880006434&loggedin=true

                            I have no idea what is going on with that thread to be honest.. I have only been on 23.01 for a day.. But I looked at mine and do see a bump in memory at 3am ish

                            mem.jpg

                            A quick look at cron jobs do show a few things that kick off at 3am it seems.. But like I said only been running 23.01 for a day, so this is the first 24 hour period.. I will look to see what happens at 3am coming up.

                            But from what I am seeing I sure wouldn't schedule any sort of reboot schedule - that is insane.. And what does it solve - sure doesn't tell you what is causing it, etc.

                            An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
                            If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
                            Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
                            SG-4860 24.11 | Lab VMs 2.8, 24.11

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                            • S
                              SteveITS Galactic Empire @johnpoz
                              last edited by

                              @johnpoz I posted in https://forum.netgate.com/topic/177886/23-1-using-more-ram/41. Based on my second day it should not increase tonight.

                              Pre-2.7.2/23.09: Only install packages for your version, or risk breaking it. Select your branch in System/Update/Update Settings.
                              When upgrading, allow 10-15 minutes to restart, or more depending on packages and device speed.
                              Upvote 👍 helpful posts!

                              johnpozJ 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                              • johnpozJ
                                johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator @SteveITS
                                last edited by

                                @steveits yeah thanks - I saw tiny little change this morning

                                tiny.jpg

                                Just something to keep an eye for a few days.. Still not seeing anything that would justify any sort of reboot schedule that is for sure.

                                An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
                                If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
                                Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
                                SG-4860 24.11 | Lab VMs 2.8, 24.11

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                                • C
                                  Cire3
                                  last edited by

                                  I know this is old, but some people do have reasons. I know I have an issue where DNS just stops resolving? but it takes between 2-4 months to actually act up.

                                  Quick reboot and everything is up and running. I have not had time to diag what the issue is, and honestly when it happens my production environment goes down (My Computer Store). And I guarantee it only happens when I'm not here as it always does. I have to contact someone to pull the plug and give her a boot. That's not convenient. Is it a "me" problem, yup... But like many others, kind of shocked it's not already there. I'm not sure anyone's software is that perfect.

                                  I'm not a programmer, but I know it's not that hard to pull off. What ransom would be asked to have a button run a cron job ?

                                  For the now part, it would be great to reboot once a month, hell every 2. Is it a Band-aid? Yup, but would be a great one until I get the time to figure what's going on.

                                  Just My2Cents.... And you get no change.

                                  S 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                  • stephenw10S
                                    stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                                    last edited by

                                    You can just add a cronjob to reboot if you need to.

                                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                    • S
                                      SteveITS Galactic Empire @Cire3
                                      last edited by

                                      @Cire3

                                      Install cron package.

                                      this is weekly, adjust for you:

                                      minute 	hour 	mday 	month 	wday 	who 	command
                                      1 	4 	* 	* 	7 	root 	/sbin/shutdown -r now
                                      

                                      Pre-2.7.2/23.09: Only install packages for your version, or risk breaking it. Select your branch in System/Update/Update Settings.
                                      When upgrading, allow 10-15 minutes to restart, or more depending on packages and device speed.
                                      Upvote 👍 helpful posts!

                                      C 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
                                      • stephenw10S
                                        stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                                        last edited by

                                        I would use: /etc/rc.reboot there. It reboots more cleanly, stops pkgs backs-up ram disks etc.

                                        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                        • C
                                          Cire3 @SteveITS
                                          last edited by

                                          @SteveITS

                                          And a simple solution without asking 10 questions in return and being told your doing things wrong.

                                          Thanks !

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