Is pfSense sensitive to dirty shutdowns/reboots?
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As the title says…
Both my pfSense and WHS2011 boxes are protected by a single UPS (APC Back-UPS RS500) with one USB port for automated shutdown. However, it also means that it can only control one of the boxes. I chose this to be the WHS2011 server for obvious reasons (terabytes of data).
That said, will it be too much of a big deal for pfSense when the UPS goes to sleep abruptly?
The pfSense is not doing anything fancy other than Squid3 + SquidGuard3, DHCP, DNS, etc.
Thanks!
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Yes
I had several times problems with squid
Until I found that it happens because of improper shutdown of the computer
Especially with squidI plugged the computer of pfsense to ups
There is a power outage
I turn off the computer
And turns it back later -
You can use the NUT package in pfSense and a NUT windows client to safely shutdown both machines. You could probably do that with the ups connected to either box physically.
Steve
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Thanks for the responses.
I'm currently looking at NUT at work but I can't make heads or tails of it. Maybe a few more hours would help me digest everything.
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Have you had a look at apcupsd?
I have it running on a Windows virtual machine. When the on-battery level drops below 50% it tells ESXi, via ssh/putty, to first shut down all the VMs gracefully (including this apcupsd VM) and then to shut down itself (ESXi).
I reckon you could have WHS ssh to the pfSense box and shut that down then shut itself down.
The Windows version of apcupsd makes life a bit easier than NUT if, like me, you find Unix/Linux command line stuff can be a bit of struggle.
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^ That is indeed promising. I've forgotten completely about apcupsd. I used this on a ClarkConnect box several years ago.
Thanks for reminding me.
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If you are on NanoBSD (e.g. CF) then it's not particularly sensitive.
A full install without any extra packages probably wouldn't have any problems either.
If you have packages with a lot of volatile data on the HDD such as squid, then you might have problems.
