Pfbox getting in Booting loop

ashima · Dec 3, 2015, 7:35 AM

Hello everyone,

My new PFbox, a month old is getting into rebooting loop.

My Hardware

Intel core 2 duo E, Intel G41 Chipset board, 4Gb DDR III, 250 GB Seagate SATA HDD 7200 rmp, Intel 10/100/1000 NIC PRO/1000MT

I have installed pfsense 2.2.3 with squid, squidguard, sarg.

It suffered a couple of reboots due to loose power connector. I guess that might be one of the reasons for it to get corrupted.

Just want to be sure that nothing else went wrong. I am attaching the core dump file in case someone can guide me.

Thank You

with warm regards,
Ashima
Dump.txt

ashima · Dec 4, 2015, 6:10 AM

Hello,

Am I providing enough information ? Do I need to provide any other info. There was no response.

Right now I have reinstalled the system but I would like to know the reason for it to go in rebooting loop.

Any pointers would be really appreciated.

with regards,
Ashima.

cmb · Dec 4, 2015, 7:26 AM

The crash you were getting was from some kind of filesystem corruption, where fsck thought it was clean, but wasn't. If you'd booted into single user mode and ran fsck manually on it 3-4 times back to back, it probably would have recovered.

cmb · Dec 4, 2015, 7:36 AM

That situation doesn't happen a lot, but has happened enough to justify further investigation. Opened a bug.
https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/5592

Guest · Dec 4, 2015, 10:54 PM

I have installed pfsense 2.2.3 with squid, squidguard, sarg.

Why not version 2.2.5, is there something wrong with it, I think if there was any problem it is solved out
in the version 2.2.5. I would love more to go with the latest stable to prevent from getting into such trouble.
If you have a proper configuration backup it might be going fast for you to install version 2.2.5 and restore
the config back.

ashima · Dec 5, 2015, 1:40 AM

Thanks for the reply. I really appreciate the effort.

This pfbox ver 2.2.3 was for my client. In all their locations we had provided them 2.2.3 and they were pretty satisfied. So just got stick to that version for all their requirements. Is there some thing really serious? Should I consider updating all the systems (about 7 of them). They are all production servers so I don't want to disturb the setup unless really required.

with warm regards,
Ashima

Guest · Dec 5, 2015, 2:11 AM

Should I consider updating all the systems (about 7 of them).

Not all of them, please beware of this! Only the system with the problem you reported here.

They are all production servers so I don't want to disturb the setup unless really required.

Having a spare hardware laying around would not to much of cost if you are basing your business on this.
Or, at a weekend when your customer is not working it might be the best to install another storage and boot
from there with version 2.2.5 then restoring the config backup and lets see what is going on.

if it is failing then you must only remove the additional storage you where booting from and all is running
as before. Perhaps 30 minutes till 1 hour and all is done. I really don´t know which version was the one
with that kind of file system corruption, could be 2.2.2 or 2.2.3 so this failure could come back and an
upgrade would solve this out for you and your client. Also a smaller APC Back-UPS might be also a fast
workaround to prevent the system from that.

cmb · Dec 5, 2015, 3:19 AM

I would definitely upgrade them all. No reason not to, and a number of reasons to do so.