Suddenly crashing system after reinstallation

florian95

Hi all,

I am running a pfSense on an old Fujitsu ThinClient with an AMD GX-415GA SOC, 4GB RAM, the onboard Realtak 1Gbit/s NIC for WAN and an additional 2Port Intel NIC for LAN. It has been running fine for 3 years, with continious updates etc.
Last weekend the system was showing some problems, no DHCP adresses were assigned anymore and DNS was also not working. A reboot attempt was unsuccesfull and the system was not booting anymore. After a short check I diagnosed that the OS disk has been broken down.
For a quick solution I plugged in an USB NVMe I had laying arround and reinstalled pfSense 2.7.2, loaded my backup config and directly updated to 2.8.0. Worked fine for half a day than sudden crashes started to occur. The system suddenly crashes, than DHCP, SSH and WebUI is not longer working. Rebooting solves this issue.
I have not been able to figure out the problem so after some issues I decided to go back to 2.7.2 as it was working stable for month. Did this yesterday and still the system crashed last night with the same issues.

I now have no ideas what to check. Do you haver any clue what the issue could be. Is a USB NVMe a problem?

Thank you and best

Florian

stephenw10

It could be a drive issue. Perhaps it has some power saving mode causing it to disconnect for example.

Do you have a crash report? Or can you see on the console where it fails?

If it is a drive problem it may not be able to store any error data.

florian95

Hi,

thank you for the info. As a new m.SATA SSD is not very expensive I will order two of them and reinstall on them.

Yes I can see the time of the crash as there are now entries in the log until I reboot the system. The only common message before a crash is a KEA Error:

ERROR [kea-dhcp4.packets.0x3f1f21612000] DHCP4_BUFFER_RECEIVE_FAIL error on attempt to receive packet: Truncated DHCPv4 packet (len=20) received, at least 236 is expected.

Not sure if this is what is causing the total crash and also did not find alot about this error at all.

Best

Florian

stephenw10

Hmm, that error seems likely unrelated. It certainly shouldn't cause a complete lack of response.

I would try to check the console directly if it stops responding again. See what's actually responding there.

florian95

@stephenw10 Thank you for the remark with the power saving settings. This fits to the picture trhat the system allways was crashing at night when nothing happens. I ordered and installed a new internal SSD. Not it is running stable since 3 nights.

I think it really have been some power states of the SSD or USB.