2100 reboot loop

chris1

Hi, hopefully someone can help.

My 2100 is not stuck in a constant boot loop. "circle" light flashes blue then on to all three flashing blue, before stopping and starting the cycle again.

This happened after a power cycle because the internet connection was lost.

No changes were made to prompt this.

Any ideas? Anyone had this?

Also the hard reset doesn't do anything, perhaps it never gets to the point where it's listening for it.

Very disappointed, this isn't an inexpensive router for a home network

bmeeks

Power cycling the appliance is a bad move! The appliance is a small computer with a disk filesystem (UFS by default), and if you just kill power it can cause disk corruption. That's likely what has happened. You should always log into the appliance via the GUI and issue the shutdown or reboot commands from there. Second option, if the GUI is inaccessbile, is the console. And the last, and least desireable option, is to pull the power to reset it.

Connect the serial console USB cable up and watch the console as the box attempts to boot. If you see error messages about the filesystem, you will need to run fsck on it a few times to repair things. Here is the official documentation: https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/troubleshooting/filesystem-check.html.

Post back if you need additional help.

chris1

@bmeeks thanks, thought I'd have to use the horror that is 3 different usb connectors chained together

It's pretty bad that in 2021 a piece of equipment can't handle sudden power loss! I'd thought this died out years ago. Puts me right off the brand

bmeeks

It's a tradeoff for performance and features versus a fully fault-tolerant hardware/software setup that is immune to sudden power failures. The full disk subsystem used in the pfSense appliances allows for better logging and installation and use of third-party packages that need a read-write disk subsystem.

The professional way to deploy these and other pro-level firewall appliances is to power them with a UPS. Can be a relatively small and inexpensive one. Just make sure it offers a USB communications ability to send status info to a monitoring daemon. On pfSense, you then install either the apcupsd or nut package to monitor the UPS and gracefully shutdown the firewall when the UPS signals that power is lost and the battery is almost exhausted.

The ZFS filesystem option is more fault-tolerant, and if you want to perform a complete reinstall, you can enable that option. I think there is a move afoot to make ZFS the default setup in coming future version updates. ZFS is not immune to issues caused by sudden power loss, but it is more resilient to the same as compared to UFS.