Netgate Discussion Forum
    • Categories
    • Recent
    • Tags
    • Popular
    • Users
    • Search
    • Register
    • Login

    To schedule a reboot

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
    34 Posts 18 Posters 36.1k Views
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as topic
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with topic management privileges can see it.
    • jimpJ
      jimp Rebel Alliance Developer Netgate
      last edited by

      @kpa:

      Since pfSense is based on FreeBSD there is the at(1) command that is designed just for one time execution of a specific task at a specific time.

      I haven't tried on 2.3 but on 2.2 the at command did not work because we didn't include all of its requisite pieces.

      Remember: Upvote with the 👍 button for any user/post you find to be helpful, informative, or deserving of recognition!

      Need help fast? Netgate Global Support!

      Do not Chat/PM for help!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • K
        kejianshi
        last edited by

        Sometimes you just should give the customers what they are asking for and print a disclaimer on the product…

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • w0wW
          w0w
          last edited by

          Does direct XML editing not work anymore? I've used it for years without any cron package installed.

          
           <minute>1</minute>
          			<hour>1</hour>
          			<mday>*</mday>
          			<month>*</month>
          			<wday>*</wday>
          			<who>root</who>
          			<command></command>/usr/bin/nice -n20 /etc/rc.dyndns.update 
          
          
          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • johnpozJ
            johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
            last edited by

            "Sometimes you just should give the customers what they are asking for and print a disclaimer on the product…"

            Sometimes ok when the customers are paying ;)  If they want this feature put up a bounty!  What I just can not understand is why is somebody still running 2.0.3??  And they are trying to debug something??  How about just move to current and its quite possible whatever your trying to debug has already been fixed or is no longer a problem, etc.

            Quite often the "customer" in these cases are just not understanding the product, and asking for shit that has no use case for the 99% of the other customers that do.

            I'm also with jimp on the scheduled reboot - that in general is a horrific idea that should be avoided at all cost..  Why would you want to reboot your firewall??  I can see it as necessary evil on some updates, like moving to current freaking version ;)  Patches at the kernel level, etc.  But in general the only time your firewall or really any system used in production should have to reboot is on some form of update to the system at a very low level.  Security patch, os update, etc.

            An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
            If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
            Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
            SG-4860 24.11 | Lab VMs 2.8, 24.11

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • K
              kejianshi
              last edited by

              Yeah - I don't reboot mine either except in the cases that you mentioned.  Still, alot of people do ask for it and alot of people get it, but not the easy way.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • jimpJ
                jimp Rebel Alliance Developer Netgate
                last edited by

                A lot of people ask for it, but very nearly zero actually need it. It's a solution without a real problem. It would confuse people who think they need it when they don't.

                If someone really needs it, it's a few clicks to add a cron job on a current version with the cron package. End of story.

                If they're on an old version they could hand edit config.xml but they should also not be on an older version.

                Remember: Upvote with the 👍 button for any user/post you find to be helpful, informative, or deserving of recognition!

                Need help fast? Netgate Global Support!

                Do not Chat/PM for help!

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • johnpozJ
                  johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
                  last edited by

                  I would love to hear an actual use case that made sense for a scheduled reboot.. I can understand a scheduled standing maintenance window where you were allowed to take the system offline for a bit.  This is when you would do your upgrade that requires reboot, hardware upgrade/maint, new/change wiring, etc.

                  I am curious to what sort of debugging needs a scheduled reboot as well??

                  An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
                  If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
                  Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
                  SG-4860 24.11 | Lab VMs 2.8, 24.11

                  R 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • H
                    Harvy66
                    last edited by

                    @kejianshi:

                    Sometimes you just should give the customers what they are asking for and print a disclaimer on the product…

                    The customer is not always right. That's called selling out. I've never had issue calling out bad ideas in my line of work. Most people appreciate my frankness. Of course if someone twists my arm, I'll give, but only have explicit warning that I take no responsibility for any issues that arise and if someone calls complaining their world is on fire Friday at 4pm, they're waiting until Monday morning. A few times I had to work weekends. But if I'm working 2 hours on Saturday, I'm taking all of Monday off and that will not count against my vacation time.

                    A professional has a duty to make sure they don't enable customers to harm themselves.

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • K
                      kejianshi
                      last edited by

                      OK - So situation where the the evil scheduled reboot would have been useful.  I have a pfsense running in Florida. 
                      It is the router for a friend but its also backup personal use VPN for me.  Went to use it because of a rare major outage caused by a storm recently took my main pfsense offline for 2 days.
                      There was no one at the place in Florida to reset or reboot the machine but it was not able to be contacted by me from here.
                      When someone was able to get to my machine, 2 days later (2 days too late), the internet was fine and it was routing fine.
                      Apparently no problems right?  What happened is the WAN IP changed and DNS was not dynamically updated as it should have been.
                      A simple reboot fixed it. 
                      Now, it would be no inconvenience at all for anyone for this machine to reboot nightly at 4am.
                      I know the real problem here was with the DNS not updating and if I geeked around enough I might be able to figure out some hack to make it more reliable.

                      However - A reboot is so much more simple in this case.

                      Its not best practice most of the time, but sure would have saved me some headaches this time.
                      Also, I didn't invent the concept of having GUI options for scheduled reboots.  It was on other routers.

                      Had the same issue with DD-WRT in the past and having it reboot kept it from being offline and uncontactable for days on end also.
                      It was a mild aggravation at times for the few seconds it would go down and come back up but at least it wasn't gone for days on end.

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • J
                        jeffvfren
                        last edited by

                        I just found a reason why I have to schedule reboot the firewall.

                        We having a problem today as pfSense corrupted, after reinstall and restore from backup config, people from outside access (for example VPN) seems very slow. But I can't simply restart it in day time, I need a reboot at 12am, and I want go to bed early  :'(

                        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • C
                          Chrismallia
                          last edited by

                          A reboot only masks the issue, It would be better to solve it

                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • A
                            a_null
                            last edited by

                            I've done it, several times. I've set up a crontab from an ssh shell:
                            30 06 * * * /sbin/shutdown -r now
                            to reboot the firewall at 6:30 each morning. It seems to stick just fine until it's physically removed, and I've used it on several v2 versions, though I can't say specifically that I've done it on 2.0.x

                            \x0

                            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • superweaselS
                              superweasel
                              last edited by

                              I have to have pfSense reboot every 15 days to return performance back to normal. From what I have deduced this unsolved issue is the cause:

                              https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/4821

                              This is a great use of Cron job for rebooting.

                              pfSense rig: pfSense SG-4860/120GB SSD
                              WAN: CenturyLink Gigabit Fiber

                              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                              • M
                                mcdiesel
                                last edited by

                                Use case for reboot:

                                When making higher risk changes (usually on Cisco), one schedules a reboot for 15 minutes time. If you screw your changes and loose access, the reboot returns it to known good state. If they're successful, cancel the reboot.

                                pfSense (over many versions) gets a bit wobbly after assigning or de-assigning interfaces, especially WAN or interface carrying default gateway. I don't know why, I don't have enough foo to figure it out.  A reboot always clears it. pfSense can also be a bit naughty adding or deleting routes. If a route to the same place may have come from two different sources, it doesn't track which source, so deletes the route anyway, even if the route belonged to the other source (eg vpn vs static route)

                                Tonight I added a new interface for an open vpn endpoint to a remote instance, to use as a gateway, and after apply, boom, vpn went down and didn't come back.  Scheduled reboot would have been useful, not that I remembered to set one anyway.

                                ps pfSense is awesome, use it on all my sites.

                                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                • R
                                  rpsmith @johnpoz
                                  last edited by

                                  @johnpoz -- how about a memory leak in 23.01 on my SG-1100. Is that a good enough reason to schedule a nightly reboot until they release a fix?

                                  Roy...

                                  johnpozJ 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                  • johnpozJ
                                    johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator @rpsmith
                                    last edited by

                                    @rpsmith said in To schedule a reboot:

                                    how about a memory leak in 23.01 on my SG-1100.

                                    And what redmine is that exactly?

                                    An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
                                    If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
                                    Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
                                    SG-4860 24.11 | Lab VMs 2.8, 24.11

                                    R 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                    • R
                                      rpsmith @johnpoz
                                      last edited by

                                      @johnpoz -- Memory leak might not be the correct terminology.

                                      https://forum.netgate.com/topic/178023/1100-upgrade-22-05-23-01-high-mem-usage/13?_=1676880006434&loggedin=true

                                      Roy...

                                      johnpozJ 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                      • johnpozJ
                                        johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator @rpsmith
                                        last edited by

                                        @rpsmith said in To schedule a reboot:

                                        https://forum.netgate.com/topic/178023/1100-upgrade-22-05-23-01-high-mem-usage/13?_=1676880006434&loggedin=true

                                        I have no idea what is going on with that thread to be honest.. I have only been on 23.01 for a day.. But I looked at mine and do see a bump in memory at 3am ish

                                        mem.jpg

                                        A quick look at cron jobs do show a few things that kick off at 3am it seems.. But like I said only been running 23.01 for a day, so this is the first 24 hour period.. I will look to see what happens at 3am coming up.

                                        But from what I am seeing I sure wouldn't schedule any sort of reboot schedule - that is insane.. And what does it solve - sure doesn't tell you what is causing it, etc.

                                        An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
                                        If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
                                        Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
                                        SG-4860 24.11 | Lab VMs 2.8, 24.11

                                        S 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                        • S
                                          SteveITS Galactic Empire @johnpoz
                                          last edited by

                                          @johnpoz I posted in https://forum.netgate.com/topic/177886/23-1-using-more-ram/41. Based on my second day it should not increase tonight.

                                          Pre-2.7.2/23.09: Only install packages for your version, or risk breaking it. Select your branch in System/Update/Update Settings.
                                          When upgrading, allow 10-15 minutes to restart, or more depending on packages and device speed.
                                          Upvote 👍 helpful posts!

                                          johnpozJ 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                          • johnpozJ
                                            johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator @SteveITS
                                            last edited by

                                            @steveits yeah thanks - I saw tiny little change this morning

                                            tiny.jpg

                                            Just something to keep an eye for a few days.. Still not seeing anything that would justify any sort of reboot schedule that is for sure.

                                            An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
                                            If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
                                            Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
                                            SG-4860 24.11 | Lab VMs 2.8, 24.11

                                            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                            • First post
                                              Last post
                                            Copyright 2025 Rubicon Communications LLC (Netgate). All rights reserved.