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    Intermittent reboots

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
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    • I
      ipreston
      last edited by

      I'm running pfsense 2.7.2-RELEASE on a R86S mini PC and experiencing frequent (few times a day) reboots.
      When I check the machine I don't see anything in /var/crash. I'm exporting the logs to a remote syslog server but I don't see any errors or warnings captured around the time of reboots to help troubleshoot. I've run memtest on the machine overnight and not hit any errors. I also set up a spare machine to act as my router and left this one running but not connected to anything and managed to keep it up for days without a reboot. As soon as I brought it back into service I started encountering the reboots again. I backed up my config and restored it to the spare machine and it ran fine for over a week. It appears to be some interaction between my config, this machine, and some activity that occurs when it's actually in use that's causing the reboot, but I'm at a complete loss as to how I can narrow down what exactly that might be.
      Any suggestions for troubleshooting would be appreciated. I'm running pretty stock pfsense, the only packages I have installed are wireguard and pfblockerng-devel.

      Thanks very much

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      • stephenw10S
        stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
        last edited by

        Do you see anything logged locally when that happens? How do you know it's rebooting? Uptime shows low?

        If it actually panics and there is no crash report it could be a drive issue. It could also have no SWAP though default install do include SWAP.

        Steve

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        • I
          ipreston @stephenw10
          last edited by

          @stephenw10 thanks for following up

          • Nothing in the local logs, they just start at the kernel bootup sequence, that's why I was hoping remote capture would shed some light
          • Uptime shows low, and more obviously my connection drops if I happen to be offline when it happens
          • Originally I had it installed on eMMC, but I've done a reinstall to nvme since from some of my reading I thought the storage format might have been why I wasn't able to capture logs
          • I've got 1GB of swap installed now. I'm not 100% sure I did on the previous iteration though.
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          • stephenw10S
            stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
            last edited by

            Ah, OK. Then, yes, you should now get a crash report if it's panicking.

            As a test you can force it to panic at some more convenient time by running: sysctl debug.kdb.panic=1

            It show a crash report after rebooting.

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            • I
              ipreston @stephenw10
              last edited by

              @stephenw10 ok that did trigger a crash log as expected. Now I'll just wait for an unexpected reboot. Thanks very much for your help!

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • I
                ipreston @stephenw10
                last edited by

                @stephenw10 alright, I just experienced a couple reboots in a row. No crash log when I booted back up so I guess it's not panicking. Looking at the logs I can see some stuff that might be relevant but nothing I can conclusively point to:

                2024-04-02 10:39:05.274 [94169:0] notice: Restart of unbound 1.18.0.
                2024-04-02 10:39:05.273 /rc.newwanip: Gateway, NONE AVAILABLE
                2024-04-02 10:39:05.272 send_interval 500ms loss_interval 2000ms time_period 60000ms report_interval 0ms data_len 1 alert_interval 1000ms latency_alarm 500ms loss_alarm 20% alarm_hold 10000ms dest_addr <My external IP> bind_addr <My external IP> identifier "WAN_DHCP "

                Anything in particular you'd suggest I look for in particular or test to help figure this out?

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                • stephenw10S
                  stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                  last edited by

                  Those logs are expected at boot. Or at any time the WAN reconnects.

                  If it hard reboots without panicking that is almost always a hardware issue unfortunately. About the only thing you can do there to get more info is to log the console output but I don't think that device has a serial console?

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                  • I
                    ipreston @stephenw10
                    last edited by

                    @stephenw10 I don't think so, unless I can use one of the USB ports as a console. I'm noticing on my spare machine (that I swapped back to) that I'm experiencing a lot of packet loss. Is it possible that an upstream issue like that could be leading to reboots? I have "disable gateway monitoring action" unchecked under routing -> gateways for my WAN so I wouldn't expect so, but the fact that it only seems to reboot when there's actual network activity happening makes me wonder.

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                    • stephenw10S
                      stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                      last edited by

                      It shouldn't be possible for anything external to reboot it. You might see a lo of logs or disconnections. Or potentially it could stop passing traffic entirely but it would still remain up. Or panic and log that.

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