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    System Locking up or deciding to stop routing.

    General pfSense Questions
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    • E
      eureka
      last edited by

      Hi All,
      I have pfSense running on a 2u server and it has worked great for years but we have started seeing some strange things happen recently.

      (Currently on 2.0 not yet upgraded to 2.1).
      1. Sometimes (not usually common). The system will just decide to stop routing LAN traffic.
      In this case I can still get access to the system via the WAN ip address and I can log into the web interface to reboot it.
      After a reboot things work again without issue.
      One of the other Tech reported that he saw something similar and cleared the state table and things came back. This only has worked once out of 4 times this has happened.

      2. Today. The system completely hard-locked.
      We were unable to access it from any interface.
      We had to have a tech at the DC hook up a crash cart and manually reboot it (hard boot).
      Afterwards, the system came up without issue. It is running again.

      No events in the logs indicate what/why it is crashing.
      This has happened 5 times now. The first 3 were very far between (months). The last two happened in the last two days.
      First one happened at ~1:30 AM, the other one (this morning) happened at ~4:20 AM.

      Has anyone else seen something like this? The only "package" we have installed is bandwidthD.
      We have a few IPsec VPN's
      We have a bunch of CARP interfaces
      We have a bunch of IP/Network/Port Aliases
      There have been NO hardware changes to the system(s) in well over 2 years.

      Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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      • W
        wallabybob
        last edited by

        @eureka:

        2. Today. The system completely hard-locked.

        What about the console? Did it echo typein? Did it respond to Ctrl-T? Did keyboard respond to keypresses that toggle LEDs (e.g. CAPS LOCK, NUM LOCK).

        Perhaps you have an intermittent memory fault.

        @eureka:

        No events in the logs indicate what/why it is crashing.

        I had a system that would spontaneously shutdown. I noticed the CPU fan would sometimes run slow, sometime stop. Perhaps the shutdown was a response to CPU temperature.Monitoring a number of physical environment variables (temp, power supply voltages, fan speeds etc) MIGHT provide a clue.

        This has happened 5 times now. The first 3 were very far between (months). The last two happened in the last two days.
        First one happened at ~1:30 AM, the other one (this morning) happened at ~4:20 AM.

        Has anyone else seen something like this? The only "package" we have installed is bandwidthD.
        We have a few IPsec VPN's
        We have a bunch of CARP interfaces
        We have a bunch of IP/Network/Port Aliases
        There have been NO hardware changes to the system(s) in well over 2 years.

        Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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        • E
          eureka
          last edited by

          Hi Walla,
          The system did not respond to keyboard at all.

          I checked on the health status (temp/etc) and I could not find anything.

          We do have traffic shaping enabled and this would be right around the time that our off-site backup sync would normally occur. I disabled our off-site backups last night and the issue did not happen again this morning.
          Im begenning to think that it could be something to do with the volume of traffic hitting the traffic shaper and killing stuff.

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