Recently upgraded to pfSense 2.5. I’ve noticed that Unbound DNS keeps crashing and needs to be manually restarted via the webUI dashboard. I’m not sure what’s causing it but I do think it’s somehow related to pfBlocker.
I temporarily disabled the DNS aspect of pfBlocker and unbound appears to no longer crash. I checked the package manger and there are no updates available for pfBlocker (there was one sometime recently but I applied that after upgrading to pfSense 2.5
Anyone else experiencing issues with unbound on pfSense 2.5?
I will try this out in a few days.
Is this pkg upgrade command something I should be running frequently? I’ve never heard of it before. That being said, I’m no expert with pfSense.
(I am currently running badblocks on a new drive and doing so over an SSH connection from my old closet laptop (poor man’s KVM) and don’t want to risk any network issues dropping that SSH.
If you’re unfamiliar, badblocks is a burn-in process for new drives that takes about half a week and it only has about 1-2 days left)
As it turns out, it may be something we should be checking more often than we do. I try to run it once in a while and find updates that are not listed elsewhere.
Ran pkg update followed by pkg upgrade an it didn’t give me any updates for unbound, but it did prompt me to update to pfBlocker v3.0.0_15 so I did so and it seems to have solved the issue (thus far anyway!)
Thanks for your pointers.
EDIT:
The pfBlocker update mentioned above has actually not solved the problem of unbound crashing. Just found roughly 24 hours after performing the pfBlocker update that unbound has crashed again. So back to square one, not sure what is causing the crash.
I’m following another thread over on reddit regarding this unbound problem and its association with pfBlocker. It seems for many an upgrade for pfBlocker seemed to mitigate the problem, but for others it did not. Perhaps more information in regards to this Unfound DNS issue will be forthcoming.
I haven’t upgraded to 2.5 yet. I’m definitely in the wait for a long while camp. I need my router software to be rock solid and it would seem pfsense 2.5 doesn’t exactly meet this criteria at the current time.
I did some searching online and it looks like this could be related to the following option:
“Register DHCP Leases in the DNS Resolver” (this was checked on my system and I have just unchecked it)
This describes the issue I’ve been having of unbound crashing as well as another issue that I thought was unrelated - but I often notice a “hang” when loading a website - right at the beginning of the “loading” process - I figured it had to do with DNS but I wasn’t sure. Anyway I rarley use the hostname provided by the device itself - rather set a static IP and custom hostname of my choosing for most devices within the pfSense DHCP reservations. So this feature of adding hostnames from DHCP leases (not static reservations) into DNS is not needed for my use-case.
Thanks to the other users for ideas - if anyone is having the same issue as me, then hopefully this helps you.
