Troubleshooting Vault/pfSense setup - seeking guidance

Goosewire

Hi all,

Running into a bit of an issue w/ my Protectli Vault pfSense setup and wondering if anyone could kindly offer some guidance. The issue may be the configuration of the Vault itself, but as plenty of people on here may be familiar with the product, I thought worth asking here anyway (esp as the Protectli subreddit does not seem very active).

I've been running a Protectli Vault VP2410 (4 Port Intel Celeron J4125) with pfSense as my router for about 6 months now. This morning I woke up to find my network offline, including my home security system, and thus began my 5am network troubleshooting...!

I managed to narrow down the issue to the router as my switch's logs showed an unexpected shutdown at a particular time, and the router was the only device I was struggling to access (modem, switch, security hub and everything else were online).

The remedy itself was simple: rebooting the Vault and loading back into pfSense. However - and this has been an issue w/ the Vault from day 1 - when the vault reboots, it will not boot into pfSense automatically. To get pfSense/my internet back online, I need to reboot the Vault, enter the Boot Manager Menu, then go to the bottom of the menu and boot from the Protectli's SSD (F11, down arrow x3, enter). This brings everything back online just fine.

Two main questions that I'm wondering if anyone can help me answer...

On the pfSense System logs, any sense on how I can diagnose what caused the initial shutdown or seek any clues what had happened? As the Vault is working fine, but needed to be booted into pfSense, I'm guessing that there may have been an unexpected shutdown in the night with no one to manually boot it into pfSense, hence the network going down. I'm not too familiar with trawling through the system log, wondered if anyone had any tips for diagnosing exactly what went down.
The Vault not automatically booting into its SSD/pfsense, and needing keyboard input, is a total pain, especially if it happens in the night and knocks things such as the WiFi/security system offline. Anyone have any tips on how to configure the vault to boot from its SSD automatically upon restart, rather than me having to plug in a keyboard and load the SSD from the Boot Manager Menu?

Thank you guys so much in advance!

SteveITS

@Goosewire Wrong category…

As suggested on Reddit try contacting Protectli for the boot issue.

There might be something in the logs. A power outage wouldn’t log anything and would explain why the switch booted. Consider a UPS…?