Strange DNS behaviour
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@michmoor said in Strange DNS behaviour:
@jkmuk @johnpoz asked if you could ping any dns server by IP when the trouble happens..
Yes I can ping the DNS servers and they also respond to some of the DNS queries without issues, but some queries seem to fail. Those that fail are consistent. e.g. bbc.co.uk always works sunnyvalley.cloud always fails when the issue happens.
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@jkmuk are you running ZenArmor ?
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@michmoor Yes, indeed
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@jkmuk disable it OR uninstall and try again. Or see if there’s an update to it via the web managed console.
I have seen this type of inconsistent behavior exactly but in my case there was an update required.
Note: in pfsense 2.7 3rd party packages that aren’t signed cannot be installed so Zen will not work. Consider that before you upgrade.
Also be very weary of installing packages like this which bring dependencies that could leave your firewall in an insecure state. -
Additionally is this something that's always happened in pfSense? Or have you been running 2.6 for some time and it's just now started to fail some queries?
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@stephenw10
The recent change is the upgrade to 2.6.Following @michmoor recomendation I did disable Zenarmor and the issue disappeared. There seems to be some in-compatibility introduced in v2.6 , also given the change to only allow signed packages in future I doubt the Zenarmor team will do anything about it. Sadly, I have decided to move to Opnsense, the zenarmor package is stable on it as has been running for a few days.
I liked pfsense and have been using it for more than a decade now, but sadly have to say good bye. Wish there was someone that developed a native pfsense package that made filtering simpler. Perhaps netgate might offer something in the future for their plus customers.
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@jkmuk how exactly does a package running on your box prevent an answer - thought you said the dns was going out, but no return - and this was via a sniff?? Your saying this zenarmor is before your sniff for filtering?
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@johnpoz said in Strange DNS behaviour:
@jkmuk how exactly does a package running on your box prevent an answer - thought you said the dns was going out, but no return - and this was via a sniff?? Your saying this zenarmor is before your sniff for filtering?
Zenarmor uses the netmap kernel device for blocking traffic. I've not investigated the details, but it is possible the netmap connection gets in front of the PCAP packet capture connection when netmap is enabled.
Netmap creates shared memory buffers between the kernel network stack and the physical NIC driver. The software that opened the netmap connection is then solely responsible for forwarding traffic between the kernel and the physical NIC driver. It could be the netmap path drops the packet before it gets a chance to be seen by the PCAP process used for packet capturing.
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@bmeeks I for sure wouldn't be a fan of that - when I sniff I should be be seeing whats actually going on the wire, or what is coming in on the wire - before any "filtering" of it could happen.
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@johnpoz said in Strange DNS behaviour:
@bmeeks I for sure wouldn't be a fan of that - when I sniff I should be be seeing whats actually going on the wire, or what is coming in on the wire - before any "filtering" of it could happen.
I'm not 100% positive that is the case in this instance, but I can see how theoretically it could happen. Depends on exactly how the packet path is altered when both PCAP and netmap are in use at the same time.
