How to troubleshoot problems?
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How do i find out what caused a problem? I see some logs but the y dont go back far enough.. I need to see basically the last 24 hours.
I have no idea what has caused a problem on my network, and no idea where to start even trying to see if pfSense has somehow malfunctioned. Any one able to give me some pointers? All i know is that the server running pfsense didn't go down (other VM's on there i can see from Event Viewer on the windows ones that they were up all night).. but my connection to the office and internet was down.. which is making me think that something went wrong with pfSense. Today after a cold reboot this morning to get it going, it is back up and working, but people in the office are getting internet only intermittently, whilst i at home connected over OpenVPN am fine. Maybe a DNS problem i thought but am not sure why all the VMs are fine, just the physical machines in the office are not working properly.. All are using pfSense as their gateway, all connected to the same switch.
Any ideas?
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You can setup an external Syslog server and store all the logs you want
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Ok, sounds like something i need to look into, but in the meantime.. is there no way from the shell to see what happened or went wrong at at a certain time lastnight? around exactly 24 hours ago to be exact
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when you rebooted you lost everything aside from the RRD data, which can be telling but logs tend to be more helpful.
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@cmb:
when you rebooted you lost everything aside from the RRD data, which can be telling but logs tend to be more helpful.
Shame. And all i see from the RRD graph is that nothing was happening.. as the server was down.
So you all suggest it is better to have an external Syslog server? How would i go about that? just any linux distro or something? Of is it just literally storage space to save the logs to.. so can be an external hard drive or something similar?
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Logging them to syslog is generally preferable. Even logs may not be telling at all though. First it's about general network troubleshooting abilities - what can you get to, what can't you get to, narrow down the problem as much as possible and troubleshoot from there. It could be any of a million things, many of which don't generate logs, from the description here.
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