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Author Topic: pfSense information added to the kitz wiki  (Read 6768 times)

Chrysalis

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pfSense information added to the kitz wiki
« on: June 07, 2023, 06:10:12 PM »

Hi guys, I have added a section on the wiki with the link below, I have shared a lot of my patches, and hopefully you guys find them of some use.  There is also some information on the patch system within pfSense.

The link is here.

https://wiki.kitz.co.uk/index.php?title=Pfsense
« Last Edit: June 07, 2023, 06:19:29 PM by Chrysalis »
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kitz

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Re: pfSense information added to the kitz wiki
« Reply #1 on: June 07, 2023, 11:29:43 PM »

Thanks Chrys.  Good job.  :thumbs:

Ive made a duplicate post in the site announcement section so that it is visible from the main site.
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Chrysalis

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Re: pfSense information added to the kitz wiki
« Reply #2 on: July 01, 2023, 11:47:20 AM »

Thank you.

I will post some more patches some time next week.
« Last Edit: July 01, 2023, 11:49:23 AM by Chrysalis »
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Alex Atkin UK

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Re: pfSense information added to the kitz wiki
« Reply #3 on: July 01, 2023, 12:28:35 PM »

Are the patches still useful on 2.7.0 as they seem to have made a lot of fixes?
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Chrysalis

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Re: pfSense information added to the kitz wiki
« Reply #4 on: July 01, 2023, 12:40:33 PM »

After I update to 2.7.0, if the patches no longer apply cleanly, I will make new one's.
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Chrysalis

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Re: pfSense information added to the kitz wiki
« Reply #5 on: July 14, 2023, 01:31:06 PM »

I will probably update to 2.7.0 second weekend from now, just before i do so I will submit the remaining patches I have (they bit more complex than the existing which is why I didnt upload initially), then after will add a 2.7.0 section.
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Alex Atkin UK

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Re: pfSense information added to the kitz wiki
« Reply #6 on: July 14, 2023, 05:40:12 PM »

Looks like diagnostic Limiters patch needs "ipfw" changing to "dnctl".
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Chrysalis

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Re: pfSense information added to the kitz wiki
« Reply #7 on: July 22, 2023, 12:21:43 AM »

Thanks Alex, as you said ipfw replaced with dnctl binary in the diagnostics layout patch.

I will update the wiki with that change and other changes probably tomorrow.
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Alex Atkin UK

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Re: pfSense information added to the kitz wiki
« Reply #8 on: July 22, 2023, 07:49:30 AM »

The other UI pages have had a fair amount of tweaking so I couldn't eyeball them.

Though it begs the question why the Firewall Rules page doesn't just have a setting you can pick to choose the default rule set to land on, it really shouldn't take a patch to make such a simple change.
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Chrysalis

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Re: pfSense information added to the kitz wiki
« Reply #9 on: July 22, 2023, 02:30:43 PM »

The other UI pages have had a fair amount of tweaking so I couldn't eyeball them.

Though it begs the question why the Firewall Rules page doesn't just have a setting you can pick to choose the default rule set to land on, it really shouldn't take a patch to make such a simple change.

I got not so good news on that.

Last night I redid all of the patches I use, I also added a nice new patch, but the default rule set for the firewall page, they removed the old code where they specified a default (which is what I had patched), the new code from what I can tell just simply assigns the lowest interface ID but i didnt understand how it was being done.  So that hasnt been changed yet, however just before going bed I think I found the code that can still change it by studying the patch that changed the behaviour, so if you still want it pushed to LAN, I will do a new patch for it.

All the rest of the patches on the wiki, either just still work, or only needed minor tinkering.

You wasnt wrong they fixed a lot as well, before IPv6 was a bit of a mess on the gateways on the dashboard, with the gateway often not there and it unable to do online/offline detection, I see they fixed 5 bugs related to that (mostly with local link gateways) and I now see my AAISP IPv6 L2TP gateway on the dash.
« Last Edit: July 22, 2023, 07:37:04 PM by Chrysalis »
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Chrysalis

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Re: pfSense information added to the kitz wiki
« Reply #10 on: July 22, 2023, 02:58:48 PM »

Ok page is updated, when I have made the new default to LAN patch on the firewall page, that link will start working.  The 2.6.0 patches are still accessible as well.

--

New LAN patch is there now.

If you want to edit this patch for another interface you need to use the internal interface name, WAN is wan, LAN is lan, however any added interfaces are usually optX where X is a number, typically starting from 1.  Easy way to find internal name is going to the interfaces assignments screen, and hover over the link to edit the interface and check the url, it will end with something like 'if=opt5' thats an easy way to find the internal name.
« Last Edit: July 22, 2023, 03:34:17 PM by Chrysalis »
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Alex Atkin UK

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Re: pfSense information added to the kitz wiki
« Reply #11 on: July 23, 2023, 04:54:55 AM »

Darn it, how did I not see how obvious that change was? ;)
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Chrysalis

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Re: pfSense information added to the kitz wiki
« Reply #12 on: June 15, 2024, 05:43:02 AM »

There will be another patch added soon, perhaps of interest to those using hardware p-states (speed shift).  Speed shift is extremely sensitive and clock speeds (and voltages) can change by a large amount with low amount of utilisation changes, this also has an impact on temperatures.

I spent some days diagnosing what I felt was odd temperatures, and discovered a few problems, one which seems to be a bug that has been known about for years where there can be duplicated rrd processes causing extra cpu usage, the other one which I have patched.

So the stock behaviour for monitoring the temperature of the CPU and chipset is the PHP based RRD script will poll sysctl for the values, this script on my unit was temporarily increasing temperatures in excess of 10C, sometimes close to 20C, the temperature would shoot up for less than a second during the poll. and then drop back down again so to me it was not realistic.

The patch is combined with a command added to the cron, the command will poll the values directly using the shell and then save them to a temporary text dump, the patch modifies the RRD code so it simply reads the value from the text dump instead of doing its own direct poll.

This method uses no extra code overhead, so has a much lower impact on temperatures which means the polled value will more represent the average temperature the unit is running at. 

Here is some graphs showing the change.

One of them is a CPU usage graph which highlights the bug with RRD gradually using more CPU cycles over time, if I diagnose this fully I will report it to the developers.  This was having a impact on the plotted temperatures.
One graph over the same time period as the CPU graph shows the affect on plotted temperature from the RRD script bug, and the far right of that graph is after I patched the system.
There is also a graph over a shorter time period which shows the before and after from the change.

The plotted temperatures are now in line with what they were when running Windows.
« Last Edit: June 15, 2024, 05:47:32 AM by Chrysalis »
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Alex Atkin UK

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Re: pfSense information added to the kitz wiki
« Reply #13 on: June 15, 2024, 09:01:33 PM »

Oh interesting, will be sure to try that out.

I know my recent checking of speedshift was flawed as sitting on the dashboard in the UI adds a fair bit of CPU usage.

I always forget the RRD graphs exist, in fact I seem to have it disabled and can't remember how/why.
« Last Edit: June 15, 2024, 09:13:20 PM by Alex Atkin UK »
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Chrysalis

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Re: pfSense information added to the kitz wiki
« Reply #14 on: June 16, 2024, 03:30:38 PM »

I have added the patch now.

The direct link is Kitz Wiki

Also attached a new 2 day plot, there is a small period in there when I was using a VPN which increased temps a little, that would have been masked out on stock.
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