NtopNG does not start when Ram Disks for tmp and var are on

[jjstecchino]

If I turn on Ram disks NtopNg does not start after a reboot. Fresh install of NtopNG starts ok, but doesnt start after reboot. Logs show:

Mar 22 08:13:13	php-fpm	51795	/rc.start_packages: The command '/usr/local/bin/redis-cli SET ntopng.user.admin.password 'f9f16d97c90d8c6f2cab37bb6d1f1992'' returned exit code '1', the output was 'Could not connect to Redis at 127.0.0.1:6379: Operation timed out Could not connect to Redis at 127.0.0.1:6379: Operation timed out'

[jjstecchino]

It would appear that /var/db/redis does not get saved/restored on reboot. without /var/db/redis redis fails to start and without it NtopNG cant run.

After manually creating that directory and starting the redis service NtopNG starts as expected but of course the /var/db/redis does not survive reboot.

Can this be fixed in the ramdisk save/restore script run at boot/reboot?

Thanks

[pfBasic]

As a workaround for now you could use the package shellcmd:

If it just needs the directory to be there on boot:

Then setup a shellcmd to```
mkdir /var/db/redis

If it needs the contents of the directory, create a directory to store the temp files:

mkdir /usr/local/etc/ntopng_tmp

then before you shutdown (or as a cronjob):

cp -iprv /var/db/redis /usr/local/etc/ntopng_tmp

and as a shellcmd:

cp -iprv /usr/local/etc/ntopng_tmp /var/db/redis

or if the directory also must be created each time:

mkdir /var/db/redis  && cp -iprv /usr/local/etc/ntopng_tmp /var/db/redis

[jjstecchino]

I'll give shellcmd a try, hopefully it will try to create the directory after the ram disk is created but before redis seervice gets started.

I just wanted to make the developer aware of the bug so that it can be fixed.

I dont know if I can file a bug myself. Over the years I have always described problem I found here in the forum and the dev took care of it.

Thanks for taking time to answer

[jjstecchino]

Shellcmd or earlycmd does not work for me. Maybe wrong timing in the directory creation.

However manuallly editing /etc/pfSense-rc like this works well. I gues this is the fix that could be implemented. Of course it does not save/restore any data and perhaps there is a better place to create this dir

make some directories in /var

/bin/mkdir -p $varrunpath /var/log /var/etc /var/db/entropy /var/db/rrd /var/at/jobs/ /var/empty /var/db/ntopng /var/log/nginx
2>/dev/null
chmod 0555 /var/empty
/bin/rm -rf $varrunpath/*

[doktornotor]

This package will NOT work properly with the ramdisks. It is also a rather horrible idea if you ask me.

# du -sh /var/db/ntopng/
4.5G    /var/db/ntopng/

The above is data accumulated after some ~6 months of usage on a site with pretty moderate traffic (~100GB/month). Sure like hell you do not want that to be in your RAM, or be backing that up and restoring on reboot.

[jjstecchino]

@doktornotor:

This package will NOT work properly with the ramdisks. It is also a rather horrible idea if you ask me.

# du -sh /var/db/ntopng/
4.5G    /var/db/ntopng/

The above is data accumulated after some ~6 months of usage on a site with pretty moderate traffic (~100GB/month). Sure like hell you do not want that to be in your RAM, or be backing that up and restoring on reboot.

No I actually don't care about historical data but I find ntopng quite useful to have a glimpse on the traffic that is going through pfsense in a nicely presented interface. I am ok with the db being cleared on reboot. I dont know though what will happen if var runs out of space, i.e. will dhcpd be unable to write leases on disk etc.