MacMini Fan Behavior
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I have run pfSense 2.6.0 on a mid 2010 2.4ghz core 2 duo MacMini for a year, using Amazon USB 3 to ethernet dongles. No real problems at all (actually traffic graphs don't display traffic). This is far from a mission critical LAN... just a home network.
Its had a fair share of power outages because I often just switch the powerstrip off to save power when I go out of town.
One day I power it up and I believe it had lost its interface assignments...some sort of config corruption must have happened. I restored from an automatic backup. Everything works, SMART passed, but now the MacMini fan is on full blast... a problem I haven't encountered before. CPU temp is 32C 89F
All I can think to do is reinstall pfSense which is rather annoying. I found this thread, but its outdated I think. After all, my fan speed was quiet for over a year until now so I think 2.6.0 underpinnings must support this mac mini fan:
https://forum.netgate.com/topic/155040/apple-smc-fan-control
I thought it would be good to at least publish my experience.
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@serengeti Pulling the plug all the time? You were lucky you got that far!!
Apart from obvious software corruption, which happening only after a year, hat's down to the stability of pfsense, can also damage your hardware.
So reinstall pfsense and if all is working get an UPS or at least shutdown pfsense and macos before pulling the plug.
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Yup that. Are you using ZFS? Hard to imagine it would have survived that long in UFS.
But of the fan speed survives a complete power cycle that sounds like something got toggled in the microcontroller flash in the macmini. You might try to default then nvram there.
Steve
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@manilx How does removing electrons from my macmini "damage my hardware"? In your defense, the hard drive head doesn't get parked and then subsequent vibration could damage the platter. But the SMART test has passed. I recall that SMART isn't the most comprehensive test system though.
I think what is going on here is that restoring from the backup config possibly overwrote a macmini fan driver that came along with the initial install. Just speculation though. If this is a case, its a bug in config restoration, not a sign of a hardware problem.
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@serengeti Do as you think best.....
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@stephenw10 Yes, I am using ZFS. Yes, good point, I think I should try an SMC reset on the Mac Mini.
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Update: SMC reset didnt work. I tried two published methods:
A) unplug for 15 seconds, plug in for 5 secs, boot
B) And also tried unplug, press power button for 5 secs, replug and boot
Reinstalling pfSense didn't correct the fan speed either.
So that leads me to think that the thermal sensor on the hard drive died somehow. How that coincided with the config issue is beyond me. Perhaps a coincidence?
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Well if you just pulled the power that is the time both things would be likely to happen. Or perhaps at power up in the case of a drive sensor. But it's not that surprising both things could happen across one power cycle.
