New to pfsense - sg1100 - DHCP server fail

Networking & Firewalls
1

Hi,
I setup my new PfSense Sg-1100. Within 12 hours of setting it up, the dhcp server on it failed and by force rebooting by power unplug and replug - it came back online.

I don’t know if its related but I log into pfsense and I consistantly get notified about the following:

Crash report begins. Anonymous machine information:

arm64
12.2-STABLE
FreeBSD 12.2-STABLE plus-RELENG_21_05_2-n202579-3b8ea9b365a pfSense

Crash report details:

PHP Errors:
[04-Jan-1970 20:18:45 Etc/UTC] PHP Fatal error: Unable to start pfSense module in Unknown on line 0
[04-Jan-1970 20:19:28 Etc/UTC] PHP Fatal error: Unable to start pfSense module in Unknown on line 0
[04-Jan-1970 21:56:28 Etc/UTC] PHP Fatal error: Unable to start pfSense module in Unknown on line 0
[04-Jan-1970 21:57:07 Etc/UTC] PHP Fatal error: Unable to start pfSense module in Unknown on line 0
[04-Jan-1970 21:59:33 Etc/UTC] PHP Fatal error: Unable to start pfSense module in Unknown on line 0
[04-Jan-1970 22:00:15 Etc/UTC] PHP Fatal error: Unable to start pfSense module in Unknown on line 0
[04-Jan-1970 22:00:46 Etc/UTC] PHP Fatal error: Unable to start pfSense module in Unknown on line 0
[04-Jan-1970 22:01:24 Etc/UTC] PHP Fatal error: Unable to start pfSense module in Unknown on line 0

Please help.

2

That seems like a scary error.
Regardless of the state of the DHCP server, you should be able to connect a computer with manually configured IP address and access your PFsense server.
I suggest treating your PFsense box like the UNIX machine it is and using SSH to access the system console and look at the logs in /var/log for additional indications of a problem.

If all else fails, you might need to completely reload the OS (ask for support from Netgate on doing this) and your config. You do have a config backup, right?

2 Likes
3

A new device that fails soon after you start using it? That is as good a reason as any to contact the manufacturer for support.

1 Like
4

Is SSH turned on as default on the Netgate hardware? Pretty sure I had to turn this on for my community edition DIY box.

5

There is an official package called Service Watchdog that you can install and then add DHCP (and any other critical services like DNS). If the service stops or hangs Service Watchdog will restart it. This isn’t often a problem, but in the many pfSense / NetGate deployments we have it has cropped up enough that Service Watchdog is a part of our standard deployment.

1 Like
6

SSH is not on automatically on the Netgate devices either.

7

Agreed. The tinkerer in me would probably start with a factory reset as an entropy bit in the configuration files could cause something like this, but it is also possible that the flash storage is corrupted in some way that may not be recoverable.

That said, there could also be a mal-configured setting which would make me leery of doing a configuration restore.