Constant crashes (Panic String: bad pte)

[costasppc]

Hello!,

I keep having constant crashes with the "Panic String: bad pte".

I am attaching the whole crash log and a picture of my system (PC with 2 GBs of RAM, 3 Intel NICs -1 as WAN, 1 as LAN and 1 as 3 VLANs for two other WANs via PPPoE and a Captive portal).

I have 2 gateway groups: 1: I use the WAN and one of the VLANs WAN as a LoadBalancing-Failover gateway with Tier 1.
2: I use all the 3 gateways with different Tiers (1,2,3) for HTTPS Failover.

The crashes started since one of the WANs in the first VLAN NIC had a big RTT and since the ISP send a tech to check the landline, I decided not to use it, so I disabled the VLAN interface.

Shall I remove the gateway?

Please help.

Kostas


PFSense_Crash.txt

[cmb]

That's pretty much guaranteed to be a hardware problem with RAM, either a bad stick of RAM or a bad motherboard causing memory issues or some other hardware problem causing memory issues.

[costasppc]

So, should I replace the RAM in the box first?

But, as I mentioned, it started when I needed to disable the specific VLAN gateway.

Best regards

Kostas

[cmb]

Almost certainly a coincidence. If you can take it offline for some period of time and run memtest, that will most likely confirm it. If somehow disabling a NIC was causing it, it's almost certain that kind of panic wouldn't be anything like "bad pte", and it's something we would have seen or heard of before and never have. If you want to try backing up your config, and completely removing the gateway and interface you have down, you can. Not really going to hurt anything at this point and that's easy to try and revert to backup if/when needed. Personally that would be what I would do first, then you're eliminating the most recent change.

Replacing the RAM is your best bet and is usually the cause of such memory issues, but there are other hardware problems that exhibit themselves as memory problems, so that may or may not fix it.

[costasppc]

Crashes stopped when I removed the specific gateway from the gateway groups that contained it (Load balancer and https failover). I set the tier to Never.

I had no crash since. Do I still need to bring the firewall down for memory diagnostic check?

Best regards

Kostas

[dhatz]

@costasppc:

Crashes stopped when I removed the specific gateway from the gateway groups that contained it (Load balancer and https failover). I set the tier to Never.

I had no crash since. Do I still need to bring the firewall down for memory diagnostic check?

It'd be a good idea to run memtest86+ on that system, just in case …