Troubleshooting what caused pfsense to hang
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I've been using an APU2C4 for my pfsense router at home for several years now and I think this is just the second time it hung on me. The box suddenly just stopped working (no DHCP, no everything) and I had to force reboot it. I was checking the system logs and a I don't see anything. It hung at around July 21, 2021 17:50 but all I see are these:
That shows the boot sequence logs right after I force rebooted it. Logs before those are all dated July 20, 2021 so those aren't really useful.
How do I troubleshoot this kind of issue?
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Since that device has a serial console, you should leave a serial client open and connected to the serial console at all times, with the client set to log the output and/or have a large (100k+ line) scrollback buffer while you're looking into the problem.
If there is some kind of crash or other error condition it would be printed on that console.
When it's locked up, check what is in the console output and see if the device responds to input over the serial console. Try things like using a menu option or hitting
ctrl-tto see if it prints any output.If the output just stops and it is unresponsive at the console and across the network, then it's likely hardware related, though that isn't always definite.
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@jimp said in Troubleshooting what caused pfsense to hang:
Since that device has a serial console, you should leave a serial client open and connected to the serial console at all times, with the client set to log the output and/or have a large (100k+ line) scrollback buffer while you're looking into the problem.
If there is some kind of crash or other error condition it would be printed on that console.
When it's locked up, check what is in the console output and see if the device responds to input over the serial console. Try things like using a menu option or hitting
ctrl-tto see if it prints any output.If the output just stops and it is unresponsive at the console and across the network, then it's likely hardware related, though that isn't always definite.
That's what I thought I should do. I only ever had to use the serial console during pfsense installation but it would be a good idea to keep connected to it at all times and use it when this kind of issues happen.
