Pfsense Bootloop

Thought I’d try my hand at building a pfSense machine… Built my first test system on a Dell laptop~ i5 2.4 gigahertz 4 gigs of RAM 60 gig SSD

Followed the YouTube setup and got through the first configuration and was able to connect to the web interface and the internet…Great!

I then moved on to Pfblocker and Suricata again following YouTube videos…

After Suricata I had some issues… Dont think I locked myself out but I believe the router restarted at one point and it got stuck in a boot loop…was not able to break loop…

After the first “failure” I went for a XCP-ng VM system on the same hardware… Had a better stability with the VM … was able to restart without issue… However recently tried adding Pfblocker and Suricata… After installation of Suricata I notices a memory leak that pinned CPU to 100% at first a restart fixed the issue… and the second time it happened the restart triggered another bootloop cycle…

From what I read my issues could be related to the restarts. But I and worries it might be something with Suricata or something with my configuration…

Ran fsck from single user interface to clear logs and was able to break loop and get back into web interface…

Doing my backups now :wink:

I am wondering if anyone has experienced these issues and what can be done to avoid this in the future…

If anyone is interested, I’ll try to load error logs at a later date…

When installing Suricata or any other more demanding plugins they will create a high demand on the CPU and may take some time to get going than just running pfsense. So my guess would be not enough resources causing it take a long time to start combined with not waiting long enough for the services to start.