Netgate Discussion Forum
    • Categories
    • Recent
    • Tags
    • Popular
    • Users
    • Search
    • Register
    • Login

    log reading to find out why my fw crashed

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
    4 Posts 3 Posters 620 Views
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as topic
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with topic management privileges can see it.
    • J
      jc1976
      last edited by

      hey all,

      Been using pfsense for a few years.. never EVER had a crash due to pfsense.. always been rock-solid.
      last night, outta nowhere, my firewall started crashing.. at least 1/2 dozen or more times and it makes no sense to me.

      When it locked up, it locked up HARD.. couldn't web in to the admin console, wouldn't respond to pings. only thing i could do was power-cycle.

      i was installing/updating a linux box i just built. all was working fine up until that, all was working fine after, all is working fine today including at this moment. it was just during that stuff i was doing with the linux box. doesn't make a drop of sense.
      as i said, i was just doing updates, downloading packages, that's it.. even if there was more, nothing like that should cause it to lock up.

      in retrospect, i should've written down the times each lock up occurred so i could narrow it all down in the logs.

      Anywho, i don't know what to look for or which logs to look at. can anyone give me an idea?

      the firewall is built from a dell optiplex 3050 with 32Gs ram, an i5-7500 cpu and an intel i350T2V2.
      short of holding a blow torch outside the case, it's not gonna over-heat. i installed a large heatsink on the nic with a fan attached.
      the highest temp i observed from the cpu during the crashes was ~50c.
      packages are: pfblockerng-dev, suricata, squid proxy (for clamav).. hmmmmm i wonder if that's it.. could the squid cache overflow from all the downloads be causing the problem?

      Thanks in advance for your input!

      NollipfSenseN 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • NollipfSenseN
        NollipfSense @jc1976
        last edited by

        @jc1976 said in log reading to find out why my fw crashed:

        hmmmmm i wonder if that's it.. could the squid cache overflow from all the downloads be causing the problem?

        Sadly, it sounds more like a hardware issue...how is the hard-drive? If you're using Squid for the antivirus, I doubt it.

        pfSense+ 23.09 Lenovo Thinkcentre M93P SFF Quadcore i7 dual Raid-ZFS 128GB-SSD 32GB-RAM PCI-Intel i350-t4 NIC, -Intel QAT 8950.
        pfSense+ 23.09 VM-Proxmox, Dell Precision Xeon-W2155 Nvme 500GB-ZFS 128GB-RAM PCIe-Intel i350-t4, Intel QAT-8950, P-cloud.

        J 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • stephenw10S
          stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
          last edited by

          Do you have a crash report? It was kernel panicking?

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • J
            jc1976 @NollipfSense
            last edited by

            @NollipfSense said in log reading to find out why my fw crashed:

            @jc1976 said in log reading to find out why my fw crashed:

            hmmmmm i wonder if that's it.. could the squid cache overflow from all the downloads be causing the problem?

            Sadly, it sounds more like a hardware issue...how is the hard-drive? If you're using Squid for the antivirus, I doubt it.

            I'm sorry for getting back so late..

            it couldn't have been a hardware issue as all has been fine since.. absolutely zero problems. it had something to do with setting up that linux box and running updates. no idea why.. and it was long enough ago that i don't remember it all, but after reading through my original post to the end where i wondered if it had something to do with the caching of updates and maybe the cache became full and it caused a kernel panic? no idea.. pfsense on that little dell has been so reliable that it almost works against me in that since there aren't any problems, there's no impetus for me to learn how to decipher the logs..

            anywho, i ended up going a different route with building my media server, using win10 ltsc IoT because the various applications i was going to be running, that was just a better route to go over debian. (sonarr/radarr/lidarr/nzbget, handbrake & makemkv, and plex server are all first and foremost made to run on windows)..

            just wish i knew how to read the logs..

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • First post
              Last post
            Copyright 2025 Rubicon Communications LLC (Netgate). All rights reserved.