DNS Resolver seems to crash almost nightly

Mattaton

This started off more intermittent, but for the past week or so, it has happened every night. Each morning I will find that my phone, for example, is connected without internet. I used to reboot the pfSense router and it'd start working again. But I've since found out that checking the DNS Resolver status shows that it is down. If I disable and then re-enable Resolver (restart it - which I now feel stupid for doing since there is a restart button for it right on the Dashboard), everything starts working again until the next night. So, something is killing it each night.

I've installed Service Watchdog, but I'm curious if there's something I can do to keep this from happening.

I'm mostly a pfSenses novice, so bear with me.

I'm running pfSense 2.7.0 and unbound 1.17.1

I have pdBlockerNG installed, but it hasn't been enabled for a year or more.

I do have Register DHCP leases in the DNS Resolver and Register DHCP static mappings in the DNS Resolver enabled, but I use those settings for local services running on an unRAID server. As far as I understand, I need those settings to resolve those hosts.

Perhaps related if the Resolver is going down before backups run, I have a slew of errors in my notifications saying:

An error occurred while uploading the encrypted pfSense configuration to https://acb.netgate.com/save ( Unable to resolve acb.netgate.com ) @ 2023-07-12 03:39:00

This server has had the same general config for a long time. I have installed updates, the 2.7.0 update fairly recently, but generally, the config has not changed. So I can't think of anything changing, other than updates, that would suddenly trigger something like this.

Any help is appreciated!

TampertK

At least I'm not the only one... You can check a few recommendations in the following topics, but this looks like a bug in 2.7 to me.

pfSense 2.7 DNS Resolver doesn't start

2.7: unbound does not restart after scheduled PPPoE reconnect

2.7.0 upgrade - DNS issues

2.7.0 - DNS Resolver crashes (?)

Upgraded to 2.7.0, having weird issues with DNS forwarder? upon reboot have to restart it manually

Mattaton

@TampertK Thanks, I'll check them out. I had already googled and found quite a few threads, but they were all a couple years old referencing earlier versions. And the possible fixes in them didn't apply to me other than installing Watchdog.

I thought maybe it could be due to an update, but I installed 2.7.0 because I was having issues with losing internet here and there overnight. I didn't realize it was the Resolver crashing until after the update, so I'm not sure if it was the same culprit prior to 2.7.0.