Boot stuck at Updating Configuration

Stewart

We have a client that was having issues with the internet. Sometimes it was intermittent, sometimes it just didn't work. We had them reboot the equipment and then it just never came back. The pfSense box didn't even play the startup sounds on the reboot so we went out on site. What we've found is that on bootup the box gets to "Updating Configuration" and then it's just endless screens of ".................". What can I do to figure out the problem since it doesn't fully boot? Thanks in advance!

jimp

You can try pressing ^T (Ctrl-T) to see what the console prints. It should list what the current process is at the time. Might give some hint about where it's stuck.

Anything else before then on the console output that shows something meaningful?

If you try to restore their configuration to another device, does it get stuck as well? It could be something in the configuration itself that is causing the upgrade code to fail, but usually that wouldn't be stuck in an infinite loop.

Stewart

Output is
load: 0.36 cmd: php-cgi 392 [running] 81.26r 23.82u 12.34s 40% 35632k

Ran it again and got
load: 0.21 cmd: php-cgi 392 [ttyout] 168.18r 26.06u 13.32s 10% 35632k

Pressed CTRL+C and navigated over to /cf/conf/config.xml. It's blank! What could cause that?

jimp

Blank as in the file isn't there, or it's there but 0 bytes? Not much could cause that, usually only a disk issue or an error that would toss out the entire config. In those cases it would try to automatically restore a backup from /conf/backup/ though.

Stewart

@jimp It's there, just 0 bytes. Looking in /conf/backup I see backups from the day it went down and the previous day. All the backups are 244K up until the reboot it seems.

9:00 244K
10:00 244K
10:35 128K
10:35 0B

Edit. I copied the last full config file into place and the unit booted up normally so it's running. I'm just concerned about what would cause that. This is the second device at this site that has had a corrupted config file. Once last summer and now this time. 2 different pieces of hardware and there's really nothing spectacular about them. WAN is DHCP. LAN is just 192.168.1.1 with a DHCP pool of 100-150. pfBlocker, Suricata and Squid are running. That's about it. Last device was 2.3.2. This one is 2.4.4 (which I'll update before putting it back into production). It's a little concerning.