Twice now I have encountered power spikes resetting the system I run IpFire on. Both times the admin and root passwords are no longer recognized. Is this known? I am using a USB drive for the system. Good thing installation is easy.
Flash storage on USB usually don’t play nice with power interruption. If you both time reinstalled, probably the filesystem get somehow corrupted while power missing. Or worse… USB drive might be ongoing failure.
Anyway
in system requirement USB drive is not specified as supported.
however into neither into hardware page is expressly suggested not to used or warned about risks of this.
Other projects allow to be installed on USBdrive, however mostly use it only as “read system + configuration”, while writing logs on other devices less prone to wear or malfunction.
After explaination an opinion: bad idea IPfire on a flash external storage: SDCard, CFCards, CFexpress, USBdrives… i personally make exception for DOMs however log writing could wear then disrupt storage capabilities of this tier of storage.
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Thank you for the reply. I used the USB drive(hard drive in enclosure) because the system was blowing out the internal hard drive on power spikes. Turns out I had a defective(and old) ups causing excessive power spikes. The USB drive has an external power brick so it handles spikes effectively. On your advice will go back to internal HDD. Does this mean the Raspberry Pi version of IpFire is not supported since it uses an SD card?
Sorry for your toasted disks…
For Raspberry Pi support of IPFire: best info source still is the wiki and the official pages, consider to take time for a read.
IMVHO however, while supported, the issue for logging/flash wear still stands: log writing of any linux system is a hefty task for that kind of storage, so there are some options for reducing the risk (lower log detail, less frequent disk consolidation of logs, all logging sent to remote syslog servers, industrial grade MicroSD, ssd or hdd connected for logging) however… i’d currently won’t use Raspberry Pi as firewall.
As SBC works great in a enormous variety of usecase, but IMO was never meant to be a multi-NIC device, at least the stock one. As a “custom built device” there are some gateway options (like RevPi Connect 4) but seems another ballpark to me.
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Strange is that admin and root pw is lost. Both are stored on different files. So even a fs corruption should not destroy both at once.
I never run into this. I had only that the systems on cheap uSD Cards sometimes loose the http server keys (If it crash short time after installation). Best is here to reboot after first connection to make sure this files are written.
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