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    Advice needed, unable to get to console using keybord and display

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
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    • K
      kallesiro
      last edited by

      I'm a new pfsense user, and something verry strange has happened.

      Everything has been working fine for 6months, but today we had a short powerloss and lost power in the hole house for a while.

      After that I can not get any response from pfsense.
      My best guess is it messed up the interfaces or something. The protecli vault seems to work fine.

      I connected a monitor and a keybord to the box, thinking I would check the interfaces at least.

      But, there's no console option nowhere.
      When it starts, it asks to choose multi or single user mode, multi is default, but when it boots it just runs the random texts while booting and then says Bootup complete.

      What can I do?
      How do I access the console?

      Re-install, but that does not give protection for next time anyway so maybe there is something I'm not understanding?

      Using the latest release.

      V 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • V
        viragomann @kallesiro
        last edited by

        @kallesiro said in Advice needed, unable to get to console using keybord and display:

        When it starts, it asks to choose multi or single user mode, multi is default, but when it boots it just runs the random texts while booting and then says Bootup complete.

        Aren't you able to loggin at this point?

        K 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • K
          kallesiro @viragomann
          last edited by

          @viragomann
          I can't seem to undestand how to log in?

          If I do nothing, the screen closes and boot starts, and there's no option to login to console.

          At what stage should I do what?

          My second guess is that the dhcp server on the box is down, so I need to figure out howto restart it.

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          • K
            kallesiro
            last edited by

            Now I have done some youtube studys...

            True, after the bootup completed there should be options on the screen to choose from.

            My screen ends at bootup complited. Nothing after that. No options to choose from, no nothing.

            My best guess after some reading is that the dhcp server is out, at least. But I'm not able to connect/ping the lan if even from a laptop whith static ip in the same subnet.

            So maybe the dhcp server plus lan interface need some configuration.

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            • V
              viragomann @kallesiro
              last edited by

              @kallesiro said in Advice needed, unable to get to console using keybord and display:

              My screen ends at bootup complited. Nothing after that. No options to choose from, no nothing.

              Even if you hit Enter or any other key?

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              • K
                kallesiro @viragomann
                last edited by

                @viragomann no, nothing.

                Single user mode seems to work, but thats no help.

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                • V
                  viragomann @kallesiro
                  last edited by

                  @kallesiro
                  Strange.

                  pfSense stores a configuration history on the disk. There should be a possibility to restore it also in single use mode. But I don't know, how to do.
                  Maybe @stephenw10 can help.

                  Also if you use ZFS you can try to restore a snapshot from the time the box was working.

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                  • stephenw10S
                    stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                    last edited by

                    It might be set to use the serial console as primary. It would usually show the console menu on both consoles if it boots correctly. You can try forcing the video console at boot:

                    https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/troubleshooting/boot-issues.html#booting-with-an-alternate-console

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