PFBlockerNG Occasionally breaks my DNS? (Solved for now?)

Hello, i’m new to both pfSense and pfblockerNG, but i wanted to give them shot. Pfsense due to its power and flexibility, pfblocker because i enjoy being able to filter out crap on my whole network instead of each device individually. .

I set them up and everything seems to be working fine… except sometimes it just randomly breaks Unbound for whatever reason. Once was during a surprise power loss(will eventually get small UPS for it) but the second time wasnt triggered by anything. I have added some extra blocking lists for it to fetch and i’ve set it up update them daily. I find that it seems to corrupt the dnsbl file because i always have to reconstruct it to get it to work (force update dnsbl list to rebuild it then reload it).

So far i’ve had to rebuild the list twice and i have had another few times where things briefly dont work but then magically decide that all is well after all

Any ideas?

Don’t know if it has anything to do with your problem, but if pfSense isn’t shut down properly it starts to display weird behaviors. I once had a friends daughter unplug my pfSense box (SG2200) to plug in her iPad. After a couple of weeks I couldn’t log in to the admin interface via https. Given that this was only a month old device I called NetGate and was told that if pfSense isn’t shut down properly the system becomes unstable.

So with all that being said I would suggest you reboot the system like you would a computer, you can’t just pull the plug on pfSense. If you use https to interface with it then under diagnostics tab select halt system. Give it a few minutes and restart the system, pfSense should repair itself if your power failure is to blame.

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If its that bad it almost seems like you need a UPS for your PFsense box… even if it only lasts for a few minutes it’ll at least shut down cleanly.

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Hmmm interesting, never knew that it was very picky with sudden power loss. I went ahead and bought a small UPS for it to see if it helps. Interestingly enough, my main UPS for my desktop tells be that theres been about 8 sudden power losses ever since i moved in here 2 months ago. I suppose that it makes sense that configs are being messed up. I know its not my home causing it because the neighborhood itself has dropped power a few times.

I’ll let it run of the UPS and see if anything changes. marking as solved for the time being.