Pfsense HDD recovery weirdness

Operating Systems & Open Source Open Source & Web-Based
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Well… I’m confused AF right now.

My APC died, taking out my home network with it. I bypassed it (power strip strait to receptacle) and my LAN came back up- to be more exact, my L2 LAN came back up.

Pinging my pfsense router, nada.

Plugged in a monitor and keeb, and I get the dreaded: reboot and select proper boot device

So safe to say my SSD that was UFS is borked.

Fine, this all tracks so far.

So the freaky part- I go get my pfsense boot USB kept exactly for this, say some explicatives as I recall my XML backup is a bit dated, and instead of ripping out the SSD and replacing it as some advice says its not just UFS but the SSD itself could be borked, and go about re-installing from USB. (btw first booted into user mode via USB to do an fdisk- no joy, says everything is fine).

So… I go about installing and this time, single disk ZFS, total format. It goes forth and installs, it reboots and BAM, all my old config is there, password is the same, all interface assignments are there, VLANs etc. Only thing I see different is it now says I have no packages (no snort, no avahi and tons of other stuff I was running, damn).

I’m confused AF.

  • How is it not nuked?
  • how do I check if ZFS is really the format now (ssh’ed in and reviewed dmesg.boot but don’t see format info) DERP, so its in the system info widget.
  • Is this normal behavior, does pfsense regularly backup and squirrel the XML away somewhere (I’d forget if I enabled this at some point) and looks for it even on a fresh install/before a format?
  • Did I not end up formatting ZFS and doing a fresh install but derped along and somehow “bumped” the HDD into working again?
    – Note I alread did the ‘shut down, remove power, hold start button, plug power back in and boot’ thing suggested to make a drive appear to pfsense again, before the USB re-install.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m stoked its running, but I’m confused AF as to what just happened. But I did not do any of the listed below from netgate:

https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/backup/restore-during-install.html

I did try the “recover from config.xml” option but it didn’t work, thus I went scorched earth later.

EDIT reading the recover thing a bit more, and being hopped up on a Reign energy drink, maybe I bumped around it did it but not knowingly-- I thought it failed and I swear I rebooted and tried again from a fresh ‘install’ menu but maybe I didn’t reboot, so it grabbed it and restored - only option that makes any sense to me.

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Yeah pfsense does keep multiple backups of the config allowing you to recover like you did and also roll back to recent configuration changes. So I think it is likely as you say; it recovered from the old config without you realising. As for the packages they should reinstall automatically but if not the config should still work when you reinstall them.

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After the recovery the update to the newer build wouldn’t work even after a few google suggestions.

With my newfound boot-into-USB-and-use-recovery ability I downloaded the latest build, installed over the old one and imported my old settings.

Apps did not install, I have to install them, but I’m getting this crash report:

#0 {main}
  thrown in /usr/local/www/services_acb_settings.php on line 121
[19-Sep-2023 15:21:45 America/Los_Angeles] PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught TypeError: Cannot access offset of type string on string in /usr/local/www/services_acb_settings.php:121
Stack trace:

Found a number of posts of people having similar issues, but no resolutions yet.