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Reinstalling pfSense and restoring from backup
When you have no other option to quickly bring your network back up
I have been a happy pfSense user for over three years, with my home networking currently running on a Netgate SG-3100 (with a power-efficient ARM chip).
All was good, until a few days back it just crashed.
I’m exactly sure how that happened. I had just applied an innocuous change (adding a new firewall rule), and everything just blew up. Most firewall rules got disabled, the DNS server stopped working, VPNs got disconnected… All suddenly and mysteriously. What I realized was that the internal state had somehow got corrupted, and when I applied the new firewall rule, the system started acting up.
Nothing I attempted seemed to work, as the UI wouldn’t let me restore a configuration, and I was getting errors everywhere. So, I tried rebooting it.
Everyone knows turning it off and on again always works. Except, this time it didn’t. The firewall wouldn’t boot up anymore.
There was only one thing left to do: a full restore of the OS. Thankfully, I had a backup of the…
