Techtimejourney has left Facebook

Facebook, what can I say. It can be good for highlighting content but sometimes it can turn out to be somewhat unneeded. Ultimately, my reasoning for leaving Facebook -regarding to Techtimejourney- comes down to producing more versatile content, which is what I am currently planning on doing. The amount of releases and stuff that is incoming will be higher and even at the current rate, I  felt a bit like a Facebook spammer when I announced my new entries on Techtimejourney’s Facebook page.

Also, for a website like this Facebook is not the best fit. As I aim to produce content, I ended up doing just the opposite with Facebook (because it is all about posting links). Techtimejourney has always been and will always continue to be a place for versatile content and Facebook does not really fit to the picture anymore.So after all, Techtimejourney’s Facebook page has now been taken down. Techtimejourney will however continue producing content and next up is a release of a terminal client “Quick Terminal”, which will (finally) happen on Tuesday.

Pfsense firewall issues: cannot get an exclusive lock

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 →