Trouble diagnosing pfsense firewall problem - maybe its FreeBSD related?

Networking & Firewalls
1

Hi team,

I’m struggling with how to approach this one. pfSense is running on a Dell R330, has all been running no issues for a while now, then a week ago the network started crashing, server appears up to physically look at but nothing on the network is reachable including mgmt UI’s and the only way to bring it back up is to reboot the server a few times.

Dell iDRAC shows two alerts around the same time this first started:
A fatal error was detected on a component at bus 0 device 1 function 2.
A fatal error was detected on a component at bus 3 device 0 function 0.

pfSense isn’t reporting any errors I can see in the logs, but I noticed that if Im watching the command line via a console I start seeing:

mfi0: COMMAND 0xfffffe0037228088 TIMEOUT AFTER 48 SECONDS

The addresses (0x…) and the seconds change and after between 30 minutes and a few hours the system becomes non-responsive and the network falls over.

I’ve run the Dell diagnostics and it returns all fine, so I’m wondering if this is a FreeBSD related issue but would appreciate anyone who can point me in the right direction on this.

Thanks all,
Andy

2

That appears to be an issue with BSD & the Dell Raid controller, there are some old posts on the topic that might help.

1 Like
3

Thanks Tom,

Ill try swapping the drivers around and post the results. Out of interest, am I right in my understanding that changing the driver preference wont persist through an upgrade?

Andy

4

Probably not and it’s not a issue I have encountered before with pfsense.

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5

Cheers @LTS_Tom,

That was it, swapped out the driver and three days no errors or crashes.

Many thanks
Andy

1 Like