When you are running a Pfsense firewall box everything will almost always run smoothly. The most typical error  scenario will happen when the system’s power gets turned off by accident – or just by a good old-fashioned power failure. When the power fails your Pfsense box might be doing something important and what will usually happen is that the database of the firewall will get locked down.

When you reboot your firewall you are likely to see an error message saying something like cannot get an exclusive lock. Regardless of whether or not you will see the error message you will have and endless reboot loop, which fires up just after the Pfsense message saying somehting like ”filesystem marked as clean”. You will also see many lines of code rapidly appearing to the screen just before your system goes and reboots. The reboot loop will continue until you will fix the Pfsense disk and remove all the locks that it has. The previous might sound difficult but it is actually quite easy to do. Continue reading →