PFsense keep crashing randomly, please help

Warden

Hi,
My pfsense box keeps crashing and I'm not able to determine what's the root cause of the problem.
Please find attached the log file provided by the Crash Report. Let me know whether other details may be useful... I don't know where I can gather more details of the problem.
Thanks in advance,
Regards,
Warden[0_1548375940551_pfsense-crash-reporter](Uploading 100%) 0_1548376021501_pfsense-crash-reporter.zip

chrismacmahon

The first dump shows an issue with DarkStat:
curthread = 0xfffff8000674c000: pid 55216 "darkstat"

The second crash is related to The NIC:
curthread = 0xfffff80003dd0000: pid 12 "irq259: re0"

As these are different crashes, we can almost rule out software. I would do a FSCK/reinstall if it comes back each of these are related to the network stack, perhaps uninstall extra packages see if it still happens. It could be the realtek nic causing the issue, swapping to an intel might solve all of these issues.

FSCK instructions:

Reboot your pfSense firewall and boot into Single User Mode by pressing '2' at the loader menu. It will boot to a question asking for a path to the shell, just press return to reach the # prompt.
At the # prompt run the following command:
/sbin/fsck -y /

Run the fsck command at least 3 times; Repeat the command until no errors are reported, even if fsck claims the filesystem has been marked "clean".

Reboot by running: /sbin/reboot

Warden

@chrismacmahon Many thanks, will perform the tasks and report back shortly.

Warden

The fsck found several errors to be fixed.
The re0 interface issue happened again, so I decided to stop using it, and replaced it with a USB / ETH adapter instead. Seems to work fine so far...
Thanks for your help.

chrismacmahon

That's great! The NIC support for USB is pretty bad, you might have other random weirdness going on.

Warden

Hi,

Using a USB adapter is much better but I still experience crash from time to time (~ weelky). I found a procedure to compile the Realtek driver for FreeBSD (https://gist.github.com/jovimon/524e116471f249626fd2ccd141f3fe05), everything went as expected and I resumed using the ETH NICs however my PFSense keeps crashing (at least daily).

I also tried the official guide but keep getting the same results (https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/hardware/tuning-and-troubleshooting-network-cards.html#tuning-and-troubleshooting-network-cards).

Looking at the logs I was able to see an issue with the darkstat module so uninstalled it, but still experiencing daily crashes...
At this point I still don't know whether it is hardware related or software/setup related.0_1552440129045_PFsense crash March2019.zip

Please find attached the latest crash dump logs, any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks