<![CDATA[pfSense Crashing Daily]]>Since I set up my firewall in January, I have been experience frequent, but somewhat irregular crashes. Sometimes I can go three days without a crash sometime I get three in a day. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the timing, but on average there is about one crash a day.

I am running a fresh install of pfSense 2.6.0 on a brand new Protectli FW4B (coreboot, 8GB memory, Intel NICs). My firewall settings are fairly basic with just a few VLANs. The only package I have enabled is Avahi to enable casting to my IoT VLAN. I was previously running pfBlockerNG-devel, but I disabled it to see if that helped. Disabling pfBlockerNG-devel seems to have reduced the frequency of crashes a bit, but I'm still seeing crashes about once a day/every other day.

The error messages in msgbuf.txt vary a bit, but far and away the most common one I see is the following:

Fatal trap 12: page fault while in kernel mode
cpuid = 1; apic id = 02
fault virtual address	= 0x8
fault code		= supervisor read data, page not present
instruction pointer	= 0x20:0xffffffff80daa74a
stack pointer	        = 0x28:0xfffffe00004eabc0
frame pointer	        = 0x28:0xfffffe00004eac10
code segment		= base 0x0, limit 0xfffff, type 0x1b
			= DPL 0, pres 1, long 1, def32 0, gran 1
processor eflags	= interrupt enabled, resume, IOPL = 0
current process		= 0 (if_config_tqg_0)
trap number		= 12
panic: page fault
cpuid = 1
time = 1677458356
KDB: enter: panic

I don't really see anything that was meaningful to me in the ddb.txt file, but here it is anyway.

About two weeks ago I reinstalled pfSense from a newly downloaded image in case the installation was corrupt, but this did not resolve the issue. The device temperature has never been elevated, I've never seen MBUF over 2%, CPU and memory seem to always stay below 10%, and the mounted disk is at only 1% utilization. I see similar entries in the forums suggest that the cause maybe hardware issues so I ran Memtest86. I let it go through two passes and it recorded no errors.

In short I'm at a complete loss for what the problem could be. Thanks in advance for your help.

]]>https://forum.netgate.com/topic/178380/pfsense-crashing-dailyRSS for NodeSun, 08 Mar 2026 23:22:09 GMTTue, 28 Feb 2023 17:58:46 GMT60<![CDATA[Reply to pfSense Crashing Daily on Fri, 10 Mar 2023 21:14:01 GMT]]>@mrewers I had a similar problem with one of mine. Put in a ticket; tech support had me send it in. They pulled it apart and verified everything, reinstalled the software and I'm not sure what else and returned it. Zero problems after that.

I suggest you contact them.

]]>https://forum.netgate.com/post/1093453https://forum.netgate.com/post/1093453Fri, 10 Mar 2023 21:14:01 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to pfSense Crashing Daily on Fri, 10 Mar 2023 21:08:26 GMT]]>Responding to myself just in case anyone who comes across this is interested in the resolution. Resetting the CMOS had zero impact on the issues and the unit crashed again within a few hours.

I reached out to Protectli's customer support to report the issue and they graciously sent me a replacement machine. I configured this replacement with pfSense and imported the configuration from my original setup. The new firewall has been running without issue for just shy of a week and I am cautiously optimistic that what I was experiencing was a hardware fault with the original unit.

]]>https://forum.netgate.com/post/1093452https://forum.netgate.com/post/1093452Fri, 10 Mar 2023 21:08:26 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to pfSense Crashing Daily on Tue, 28 Feb 2023 19:50:47 GMT]]>@fsc830, I'm not sure that leads me anywhere new but thanks for the additional data point. To exhaust all options I just tried resetting the CMOS per Protectli's instructions. I'll sit with it until it crashes again. I guess after that I'll explore other hardware.

]]>https://forum.netgate.com/post/1091237https://forum.netgate.com/post/1091237Tue, 28 Feb 2023 19:50:47 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to pfSense Crashing Daily on Tue, 28 Feb 2023 19:54:05 GMT]]>There is an old thread in FreeBSD forum which shows the same error message.
Unfortunately without a solution.
But the recommendations there for looking into hardware is the same, I would do in this case.

Regards

]]>https://forum.netgate.com/post/1091222https://forum.netgate.com/post/1091222Tue, 28 Feb 2023 19:54:05 GMT