Softflowd getting started twice

codican

I recently upgraded to 2.2.2 from 2.1.5. I was using shellcmd to start two softflowd instances to monitor the LAN and WAN interfaces. 2.2 has a native softflowd package so I opted to use it, however, during bootup. Depending on the timing, this can result in 4 softflowd instances, 2 for each interface. I haven't checked yet, but my guess is the softflowd.sh RC script is getting executed twice, though I don't know why.

dev667

Remove the package and then check under /usr/local/etc/rc.d/ for anything softflowd related; I ran into a similar issue and found an old symlink in that directory, deleting it fixed the problem.

codican

I had already looked in there and only had a few scripts, none softflow related. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the package as you suggested, but it still had the same problem. I also tried modifying the softflowd.sh script to add a random delay, but it's getting overwritten during bootup.

codican

I did some more investigation and believe the problem is because the softflowd sync is starting the service, which happens right before the pfSense package manager starts the service (hence the duplicate startup). I logged the defect as https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/4731.

If anyone else is having the problem, edit /usr/local/pkg/softflowd.xml and change the call to restart_service("softflowd") on line 194, to restart_service_if_running("softflowd").

AaronTS

I just wanted to chime in that the issue still exists (even though in your link to the bug they say that it was fixed in 1.2).

I was having the same problem. My netflow receiver (PRTG) was consistently showing doubled values. I am running:
pfSense 2.3.2
softflow 1.2.1_2

After editing the softflowd.xml like you suggest and restarting the service, it immediately fixed the bug. My traffic graph no longer shows doubled values.

It is worth noting that I have softflow monitoring two interfaces: the physical WAN and the VPN. The VPN was reporting correct values. Only the physical WAN was showing doubled numbers. But the issue was affecting all three of my pfSense devices.