Pfsense crashes after config restore on new hardware
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I'm ultimately aiming to set up HA. I have a new box with different hardware. My current config is stable. I've had no issues with crashing in the 3 years I've been using it. When I restore it to the new system, pfsense crashes, and gets stuck in a boot / crash loop for several cycles.
From reading around, it seems this should be a fairly straightforward process. Nonetheless, I tried editing physical interface names before restoring config, removing PPOE WAN, and some other stuff, to no avail. I'm a bit stuck on what to do here... and concerned if this issue is happening now, it would happen when syncing XML.
If anyone has ideas, I would appreciate it. Several different crash logs are attached.
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Unfortunately those panics are each slightly different and yet not very detailed. It crashes in a similar place but the way it's crashing looks more like a hardware issue than software.
You might try a CE 2.7.0 snapshot to see if it runs better on that hardware, but you may be better off trying out some hardware/memory tests first to ensure there isn't a problem there.
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@jimp Ok. I did do 4 passes on memtest to rule memory. Can give a go on a full system stress.
I haven't been able to get it to crash by installing from scratch and doing some light configuration, rather than restoring config.
One thing I noticed when getting it to boot restored config.. I've had it crash multiple times when I deleted an interface. Not sure if that is any kind of clue as to what's going on.
Think it would be worth swapping out for a different NIC? Old box has a Chelsio T520-BT, and the new one that's crashing has an Intel X550-T2.
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The Intel card is more likely to be stable (unless it's a fake/clone and not genuine), so that shouldn't be it, but you can swap the card out and see. If the card was to blame I'd expect to see it somewhere in the backtraces and it didn't have anything like that.
Restoring the config will activate a lot of things at once so it puts a load on the box faster than configuring things individually would. You may not hit a problem until you turn on just a little too much and the hardware gets stressed and then crashes.
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Little miffed I didnt try the dev release earlier. I spent many hours trying to figure out the problem, restoring sections one by one and tweaking system portion of config. Just installed 2.7 and restored config. Moved a couple things around and rebooted a few times and it hasn't crashed. Not sure I'm out of the woods, but it was crashing very reliably before, so I would say this looks promising.
Any thoughts as to the why on this? Its a white box build with fairly new release hardware, though it looks like stuff that was released before 2.6.
Happy with a resolution if it sticks, but also curious as to the why. Last thing I want is an unstable router in the future.
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Hard to say for sure, but there are a number of changes between FreeBSD 12.x and 14.x that likely improved support for that hardware.
