pfsense boot stuck at "starting dns resolver"
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Had a power outage and now pfsense will not go past starting dns resolver. The esxi server hosting it was not shut down properly, unfortunately no I don't have an UPS. Now I am unable to boot pfsense completely. Restarted the vm, restarted the server, verified other vms on that disc will run( the work just fine), and no luck still.
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Hi,
You still need to look at the system logs.
Communicate us anything that you don't understand.Also : you are using a VM, so it's sopoooooooooooooo easy to boot up using a console access.
Do so .... and again, copy (text) paste anything you see that you think is strange.And you earned it : running a server with UPS ?
Like walking around with a gun and the safety is off .... and complaining you exploded your right foot ^^ -
@Gertjan trust me I am aware, car was made priority when the engine let go so choices were made. As for what I am seeing on boot, I see nothing odd, just when it gets to starting dns resolver it just stops. Saw someone a little while back with the same issue but never paid much attention. I am still new-ish to freebsd command line so don't know how to go after any other logs.
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Under normal circumstances a power outage is not a problem on pfsense in a vm.
I do a power off since no vmtools package install and thats equivalent to a power outage.
Do a full backup of the VM and if it happens, then delete it and copy the VM back in the repository and boot it.
Voila.
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@Cool_Corona just tried that. Esxi is coming back with "task was canceled by a user", looked that up and esxi is saying the md5 checksum doesn't match. Looks like it might be a full reinstall and start over.
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Typically, the resolver takes (a long) time to start up when :
The WAN isn't up .... that will confuse resolver/unbound.
It has a lot of work to do to actually start up : like parsing out millions of lines with IP addresses from, for example : pfBlockerNG. Are you the one that uses pfBlockerNG "with all the feeds activated" ?While your system is starting, can you activate a console access using an SSH client (Putty or whatever), goto option 8 and execute this :
clog -f resolver.logclog -f system.log
might also be interesting.@bigchoppers2003 said in pfsense boot stuck at "starting dns resolver":
I am still new-ish to freebsd command line
The bad and good news : they are all the same.
Also : when there are troubles, forget about the point and click interface, it's the first one going down. You might as well forget about the mouse entirely.
It's you, the keyboard, a screen and some commands.
Basically, when you maintain a device using a processor, you're observing the logs. That was valid in the sixties, and is still valid today.edit : also, before you re install, boot pfSEnse with the VM console, and switch to single user mode (see manual how to do this).
Do multiple fsck checks - as described in the manual.
While your at it, make a copy of your /cf/conf/config.xml -
@Gertjan I have used command line before: cmd, Debian, Ubuntu, and a few others (and yes I know Ubuntu and Debian are similar but to me learning them myself they are different languages). I appreciate the commands and will be trying to rescue my config before I even try to do a reinstall. I do have pfblocker installed and run a few lists, because I got so tired of ads all the time, but nothing crazy like a few YouTube videos I have seen when people do a walk-through of theirs. I think I have the top 5 or 8 ad, spyware/adware, and tracking lists going. I have let the machine sit booting for 20 or 30 minutes and still never passes the DNS resolver step.
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Keep in mind :
This is your error description :@bigchoppers2003 said in pfsense boot stuck at "starting dns resolver":
will not go past starting dns resolver
Impossible to enumerate all the possible isseus (people create new ones every day).
Up to you to look them up. You have to go to 'the source'. -
@Gertjan I know the possibilities are endless on what it could be, but all the posts I had seen coming up about people having issues at one point all seem to be gone. Been searching to see what fixes are out there for a few hours before I made this post, and the newest one I saw was from 2015 on pfsense 2.3.3 and I am running 2.4 release p3 if I remember right. I will try to get in and look at the logs and see what happened, was trying the redeploy first to keep things simple.
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Was never able to get it back up and running or able to retrieve my previous config. Nothing was ever fixed, tried many things and none of them worked, seems like the vm just got corrupted from a bad shut down.
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@bigchoppers2003 said in pfsense boot stuck at "starting dns resolver":
corrupted from a bad shut down.
Technically that's possible on anything with a file system. Just because it doesn't always happen, or a device can sometimes self-recover, doesn't mean it can't break. Sorry you ran into it.
