APU2 crashing often

chillr

Thanks for looking into this for me, would it be a fair assumption that the main cause is most likely hardware?

jimp

#1 and #3, it's possible, hardware/drivers/BIOS, but #2 is likely not hardware.

hda

I've got a new APU2 board that is crashing every day or so and would like some help figuring out what the cause may be.

You could assure the board also with a mSata disk & Linux(i.e. Debian).

And what is your experience with 2.3 ?

chillr

Haven't tried 2.3.

2.2.6 is installed on mSATA and have tried two different mSATA SSD's.

Any recommendations of how to stress test if I install Debian on the hardware?

dugeem

FYI - I have an apu2b4 with 160120 BIOS and Toshiba mSata SSD and it's running fine with 2.2.6.

Lightly loaded although it handles between ~2-20k firewall states for incoming requests to my NTP pool server.

Have you checked your power supply? Seem to remember PC Engines recommending minimum 12V/1.5A.

How old is your apu2? Do you have both of the board mods? I think one was related to EMI - might be worth checking with PC Engines.

chillr

Mine's a apu2b4 purchased a couple of weeks back. It has the 160120 BIOS and the power supply is 12V / 2A.

I'll check with the local supplier regarding the board revision/mods but there is a blue link wire on the rear and green one on the front of the PCB.

A Former User

@chillr:

Mine's a apu2b4 purchased a couple of weeks back. It has the 160120 BIOS and the power supply is 12V / 2A.

I'll check with the local supplier regarding the board revision/mods but there is a blue link wire on the rear and green one on the front of the PCB.

We have the same board, the only time I ever have a crash/lockup was on reboot which for me was fixed with some loader.conf settings.

But yes, otherwise, same board, same bios and if your power supply is in good working order (I've seen similar problems on raspberry pi's that didn't have enough power) i'd probably start troubleshooting the msata/board.

chillr

Update for anyone interested…

I've reset to factory defaults and then manually reconfigured pfsense and can report that the APU2 is no longer crashing, so the problem seems to be with something in my old configuration / restoring my backed up config file.

Have also tried both 2.2.6 & 2.3 and both run stable

j.koopmann

Hi,

I am experiencing something similar. Did you reinstall pfsense completely or simply factory reset and reconfigure? Did you ever find the root cause? What did the crashes look like? Were there various different reasons in the crashes or could you pinpoint it to one or two root causes?

Regards,
JP

chillr

Hi JP,

No I didn't reinstall - just 'Reset to factory defaults' from the console then reconfigured. I didn't investigate any further sorry.

j.koopmann

Thanks. Do you still have aes-NI enabled? Looking for anything here….