Diagnosing a PFSense Crash
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Morning all,
First off I should mention I am quite new to pfSense and am in the process of migrating our IPTables /IPRoute2 Linux kit over so I am sorry if this is a stupid question. Basically we have a PFSense system which rebooted this morning and asked me to submit a crash report to the Developers (which I did), I am now trying to find more information about the crash so I can figure out what I need to do next. Rather than a solution to the crash I am after an approach to find out what caused the crash so I can choose the appropriate action. How do people tend to go about it? I can't find a syslog / kernlog available in the gui which is where I'd be looking on Linux.
Cheers
V
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What about RTFM?
https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Unexpected_Reboot_Troubleshooting
https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/System_Logs
Instead of immediately submitting crash, you can also view dump and use google-fu or just post dump here. -
Thanks, yes I did read those pages but lets be honest they are rather brief and can hardly be described as a manual… As I said before I like to fix problems myself and am looking for the best approach, for example where do I find better logging that has more than 50 entries? I am not looking for someone else to fix it for me or pointless RTFM comments, the message actually tells you to post here so I followed the instructions!
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pfSense is based on FreeBSD, so most of documentation you will find here — https://www.freebsd.org/docs.html
Better logging is a crash dump you have send to pfSense team, what else? You can also change the default 50 entries behaviour of syslog via GUI, if you want more just look at /status_logs_settings.php on you pfSense firewall, you can even setup external syslog server and send all log directly to it.
https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Copying_Logs_to_a_Remote_Host_with_Syslog
https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Log_Settings
despite the documentation slightly outdated after reading it you should not ask such questions like
"where do I find better logging that has more than 50 entries?"
Yes, pfSense docs are not the best documentation but I can not agree with you about "pointless RTFM comments" — most of crashes of stable 2.3 are related to NIC drivers and this is solvable problem in most cases, that was pointed in https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Unexpected_Reboot_Troubleshooting. You have provided NO information about you hardware and software, so your first question and offense at the expression "RTFM" absolutely not justified, IMHO. If you are not looking for help here, I don't understand what kind of response are you waiting for.
May be this? https://www.amazon.com/pfSense-Definitive-Christopher-M-Buechler/dp/0979034280
