4200 Dead

toroloco

My 4200 just died, lost the eMMC storage maybe? I just submitted a ticket, but maybe someone here can diagnose something in the meantime?

This is the ticket I wrote support:

Tonight my network traffic just stopped. Could not access webpage nor SSH into 4200. Round orange light solid. Could not power down using power button, had to unplug and replug in. Round orange light solid, then blinking.

Console showed "no media present" and would freeze (screenshot 1 and 2).

Screenshot 1:
Screenshot 1.png

Screenshot 2:
Screenshot 2.png

Went into BIOS to look at boot order, not sure why I was seeing two entries for Fedora among the boot options (screenshot 3, 4), and no matter how hard I tried to boot from the pfsense entry it wouldn't boot, would drop me to efi shell.

Screenshot 3:
Screenshot 3.png

Screenshot 4:
Screenshot 4.png

Tried to re-install pfsense from USB drive, received error that there were no valid storage devices available. Of note, I've had recurring problems over the past few months (really, since I received my 4200 in February last year) where the web interface and SSH access would be VERY slow and internet access severely degraded, requiring a reboot. Logs showed nothing significant, other than an occasional WAN drop which I read online may cause the symptoms I was describing.

Screenshot 5:
Screenshot 5.png

I'm really confused about the Fedora entries. No one has physical access to my box except me, can someone in my network mess with the eMMC over the network? Or is this a sloppy install at the factory?

Gertjan

@toroloco said in 4200 Dead:

I'm really confused about the Fedora entries. No one has physical access to my box except me

Don't worry about these.
Probably zerod out GPT boot options probably default to that text string.
A BIOS, back then, stored in 32 Kilobytes was 'stupid'.
A UEFI stored BIOS, probably 16 Mbytes or even more, is still 'stupid'

Didn't even know a 4200 has a user accessible BIOS.

About emmc - see here ...

stephenw10

@Gertjan said in 4200 Dead:

Didn't even know a 4200 has a user accessible BIOS.

Yup full AMI bios in the 4200. Currently.

If it's in warranty then you should open a ticket an if it really has failed it would be replaced.

If not you can add an NVMe drive and install to that:
https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/solutions/netgate-4200/m-2-nvme-installation.html

nimrod

@stephenw10 said in 4200 Dead:

@Gertjan said in 4200 Dead:

Didn't even know a 4200 has a user accessible BIOS.

Yup full AMI bios in the 4200. Currently.

Any plans for core boot bios on future devices ?

stephenw10

We are looking at alternatives. Development costs are significant though.

JonathanLee

@stephenw10 how many NVMe drives can this model rock? You could do mirroring on it, wow !! That is a lot of ports, it could do logging on one, disk cache on one with rock running, snort logging. Wow 4100? Get a Optane H10, Amazon still sells them. Great deals

stephenw10

The 4200 has two slots that support NVMe. The 3rd slot is USB only.

toroloco

Opened an RMA, shipped it this afternoon, the eMMC presumably did fail. When I get it back I'm definitely moving off the internal drive and onto an NVMe. Thanks Netgate for the quick response.

I think it's pretty clear the eMMCs are causing repeated problems, and I'm sure there's a threshold where you should decide to do away with the "base" model and just automatically drop an NVME in these by default as you sell them. Doesn't have to be huge or expensive.