SG-2100 Hangs Every Few Minutes for a few seconds
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I have a SG-2100 I just bought and set up this week. Overall it wasn't a hard setup, but it's driving me crazy in that every few minutes (say ~10 minutes) it seems to hang. I have a 200MB down 10MB up cable modem WAN connection. When it hangs, any ongoing Teams/Zoom call stops all other web traffic stops too on every device on the LAN. I checked the traffic graph and you can see on the graph that even the graph interface hangs (see the straight line going across 23:20 in the image.
I've turned everything off I can find and normally it runs at 20-30% CPU and ~5-15% of the other resources. It doesn't show any peaks in usage prior to these hangs. What's going on? I've rebooted several times with no changes.
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@sammiorelli can you run top or something and see if anything is spiking CPU?
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Does your external/ wan ip change when this happens?
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I'm not 100% sure what "top" means but at least when I watch it on the web GUI I don't see CPU spikes. Is there a way to find a log file or something that would show warnings of high CPU load?
The external/WAN IP does not change when this phenomena happens.
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Just following up, these hangs seem to be at about 6 minute increments. Trying to narrow in exactly how often they happen, but also they last for different durations, sometimes just around 5 seconds, others more like 10-15 seconds.
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@sammiorelli Sorry, my bad assuming too much. If you didn't see CPU spikes in the GUI, that's all I was looking for. Not really sure if there would be anything in a log showing that.
about 6 mins, do they happen all day or do they seem to be during specific time periods (like say normal working hours)
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@mer We first discovered the phenomena during working hours. But it continues during the evening as well. Streaming videos that aren't live it doesn't mess with too much (long enough buffer on Netflix, etc. to survive 6 min spaced apart 5-15s outages) but anything that's like a live stream (or during work hours video conferences) it's pretty catastrophic.
Any way to know if this is a hardware issue with a new device that's only a few days old?
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Further thinking about it made me think maybe it's a heat issue since the hangs are so regular. The top of the device was not noticeably warm, but I flipped it on its side and the bottom (metal side) was quite warm. It's just been sitting on a flat hard countertop like any other passively cooled router/wifi device, so it seems like this shouldn't be it.
Well, it wasn't it. After a few hours on its side, same hanging every ~6 minutes behavior continues.
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@sammiorelli Please check: STATUS -> SYSTEM LOGS -> General Tab.
Is there anything in that log that indicates the firewall thinks it has issues every time this happens?
This could be anything from boot drive eMMC not responding, to WAN link not responding, or Unbound DNS restarting or what not.
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What version of pfSense+ is currently installed on the device? It should be 21.05.1. If not, the first thing you need to do is update to the latest version. If I recall correctly, one of the earlier pfSense+ and CE releases had this issue of periodically hanging.
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@bmeeks that is a good question. It also shows the "collective memory" of the group. OP says "just bought and set up this week" so I'm assuming its on latest within last month or so.
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@mer said in SG-2100 Hangs Every Few Minutes for a few seconds:
@bmeeks that is a good question. It also shows the "collective memory" of the group. OP says "just bought and set up this week" so I'm assuming its on latest within last month or so.
Yeah, I saw that note, but it's possible the box sat on the shelf for some time with an older "original at the time of manufacture" version installed on it. Either way, the easiest first troubleshooting step is to verify the box is running the most current version of pfSense+.
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@bmeeks I've been guilty of that. Buy a backup unit, get it configured when I first get it, then put it on a shelf until needed.
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There was an issue on armv7 that could present like that when pf was reloaded. It didn't affect the SG-2100 though.
If there is nothing logged and nothing showing in Diag > System Activity could it be something upstream?Steve
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Hey everyone, thanks for your kind suggestions. At the same time I was working with Netgate directly as I personally became convinced pretty quickly that this was a hardware issue.
After 2 days of installing new firmware from console, resetting settings, and turning things off, Netgate eventually agreed it was hardware and gave me an RMA. Now I'm in the waiting game between shipping the device back and getting a new one. I have to say, having to pay return shipping for a dead on arrival device kinda blows. So does 2 days of hours spent troubleshooting (a few times with techs who clearly were convinced the fault was me misconfiguring things).
New customer here, not sure if I'll be a repeat one after this experience. What's worse: Ubiquiti where they lie about being hacked (which is why I picked netgate over the EdgeRouter) or this?
But I can say the community (y'all who replied above) seem pretty great!
