Disabling the RAM disk and subsequently rebooting causes the boot environment to become unbootable.

w0w

I needed to disable the RAM disk for testing purposes, so I unchecked the corresponding option in the pfSense GUI. The system requested a reboot. Upon the next boot verification, the system offered either the previous boot environment or recovery mode.
Can anyone confirm that? Please do clone of your working BE before testing!

w0w

the other firewall have the same symptoms

stephenw10

Hmm, Yup. Digging....

stephenw10

Do you have Nexus/MIM enabled?

w0w

@stephenw10 said in Disabling the RAM disk and subsequently rebooting causes the boot environment to become unbootable.:

Do you have Nexus/MIM enabled?

Hmm, no, it's disabled now, but I think it was enabled a couple of weeks ago just for testing. I tested it a bit and then disabled it.

RobbieTT

@stephenw10 said in Disabling the RAM disk and subsequently rebooting causes the boot environment to become unbootable.:

Do you have Nexus/MIM enabled?

Is it something we need to have installed & enabled?

It kinda looks like something that would be in the core build and only used only if required.

️

stephenw10

It's included but disabled by default. When you enable it the config is processed through the MIM backend which can introduce unexpected results.

We have replicated this particular issue reliably now though. Fix is incoming.

w0w

@stephenw10
Any updates on this?

stephenw10

Yes, that should be fixed now. I'm not sure if it made the May 7th build but it will be in the next one if not.

cmcdonald

@w0w said in Disabling the RAM disk and subsequently rebooting causes the boot environment to become unbootable.:

@stephenw10
Any updates on this?

Can you inspect the contents of /cf/conf/RAM_Disk_Store from the recovery shell after a boot failure?

ls /cf/conf/RAM_Disk_Store should do it

@w0w I bet you are going to see a file pfnet-controller.db.gz in that directory

w0w

@cmcdonald said in Disabling the RAM disk and subsequently rebooting causes the boot environment to become unbootable.:

ls /cf/conf/RAM_Disk_Store should do it

@w0w I bet you are going to see a file pfnet-controller.db.gz in that directory

Yep and another one too, .bak

cmcdonald

@w0w said in Disabling the RAM disk and subsequently rebooting causes the boot environment to become unbootable.:

@cmcdonald said in Disabling the RAM disk and subsequently rebooting causes the boot environment to become unbootable.:

ls /cf/conf/RAM_Disk_Store should do it

@w0w I bet you are going to see a file pfnet-controller.db.gz in that directory

Yep and another one too, .bak

Thanks for verifying!

We've got a root cause now, and are assessing potential solutions.

This will make it into 25.03.

stephenw10

Yup, turns out it wasn't fixed. Just hiding!

cmcdonald

Should be fixed now!

w0w

@cmcdonald
Confirming. Applied 34c529de27b79cfbbcd0e266e17ca7809f3b2a88 patch and all good now.

w0w

Sorry but something else is missing, the bug is back Immediately after update to 25.03.b.20250515.1415, ramdsik already disabled.

stephenw10

You'll need to reapply the patch to that. The fix was put it just after that was built. It will be in the next public build.

w0w

@stephenw10
Ok. Will try later