Unscheduled reboots / crashes
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Hello there.
I've been using pfsense for a while now… had it running on some ageing hardware… and for various reasons (broken hard drive) I've upgraded my pfsense hardware and because of some issues… decided to also upgraded to 2.1. I'm running pfsense at home (personal - not business).
My hardware is: an HP Compaq DC7600 Small Form Factor (Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz) - I purchased this as Ex-Lease - in which I've installed a D-Link gigabit network card.
What's happening is that the pfsense / computer is rebooting randomly sometimes up to 5 times per day… sometimes not at all. The reboots are generally very quick… but for the file system corruptions that need to be repaired. I'm unable to determine why the reboots are occurring.
I have reset the BIOS defaults. And This evening re-installed PFSense from the latest snapshot (20130713-1509). And I've already had one unscheduled reboot.
The drive smart status reports as Passed.
I've reseated the RAM… and indeed swapped the ram between ram slots.So for now I've removed the firewall from service and I'm running off the ISP provided router… I have configured PFSense to be on the LAN and pointed the WAN gateway to the ISP's router… it means I can configure and use PFSense from selected machines on my network if I choose. That way I don't impact the family with "internet outages"… just me.
Any ideas where I can look to identify the fault?
- David
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No enough information. There have been kernel panics with FTP patches, try with todays snapshots when they are available.
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No enough information. There have been kernel panics with FTP patches, try with todays snapshots when they are available.
Thank you. Will apply update tomorrow.
I'm happy to provide more information… just not sure how to get it and/or where from.Incidentally it's rebooted again and (I'm not even putting my traffic through it at the moment).
- David
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Any ideas where I can look to identify the fault?
Perhaps the power supply is not working correctly, for example barely able to supply the current required.
Perhaps the motherboard is old enough to suffer from the "bad capacitor" problem which produced a variety of hard to explain crashes, reboots etc. Check to see if any of the capacitors are bulging or have burst open.
Perhaps the operating system is detecting an inconsistency, reports a "panic" then reboots. In this case when you connect after the next reboot the GUI should report that a crash report is available. Post the crash report here - perhaps someone will recognise it.
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Any ideas where I can look to identify the fault?
Perhaps the power supply is not working correctly, for example barely able to supply the current required.
Perhaps the motherboard is old enough to suffer from the "bad capacitor" problem which produced a variety of hard to explain crashes, reboots etc. Check to see if any of the capacitors are bulging or have burst open.
Perhaps the operating system is detecting an inconsistency, reports a "panic" then reboots. In this case when you connect after the next reboot the GUI should report that a crash report is available. Post the crash report here - perhaps someone will recognise it.
I've been running the HP diagnostics CD… the machine sometimes reboots when loading the CD. Sometimes the diagnostics completes end-to-end other times it just randomly reboots. So… like you have indicated… maybe a "bad capacitor" or a power supply issue. So I'm giving up and returning the machine. I'll either get a replacement or a refund.
For the little time that the machine did work for me… I used Gigabit ethernet cards… these combined with the 3GHz CPU and the 1GB of RAM… sure made PFSense fly - I really noticed the difference from my old hardware.
Thank you for your assistance.
- David
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Not to sound like a broken record, but when I get a computer acting this way, I load it with ubuntu and run prime95 in stress test/torture mode to see if it crashes in short order. If so, at least I know to focus on hardware vs software issues.
Last time I had one acting as he described it was getting kernel panics and it was weak capacitor(s) on the mobo for the ram.
Replaced mobo and all is good. -
I had a very stable pfSense box crash with the July 7 build yesterday. Updated to the July 15 build, hoping whatever caused it is fixed knock on wood
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dgwilson,
Maybe too late but did you try the HP diags with the D-link card out of the machine?