My firewall shutdown, actual power down, what might cause this?

Hardware
1

My firewall shutdown, actual power down, what might cause this? I do not have any hardware integration monitoring on this specific ipfire instance, since it is older 32bit hardware. So I suspect a hardware issue caused the shutdown, not ipfire its self. But just to validate, what logs should I be reviewing? Beyond say, /var/log/messages?

2

Hi,

since we do not know which hardware issue caused your system crashing, there may or may not be any log lines at all. Just to have it mentioned at the beginning… :slight_smile:

That being said, disk issues can be spotted by executing

smartctl --all /dev/sda

(in case your disk supports SMART, which virtually all modern SSDs/HDDs do). Sometimes, SMART log message such as “failure expected within 24 hours - save all data” are written to the log days or hours before the crash.

Apart from that, some BIOSs of servers or more professional hardware are capable of logging similar events, but this highly depends on the individual systems. Running a memtest (included into IPFire, but needs a reboot) might be helpful for spotting RAM-related issues.

Good luck! :slight_smile:

Thanks, and best regards,
Peter Müller

3

Have you checked /var/log/messages if the system is sudden down or save shut down by an ACPI event?
Sudden down normal is an overheat CPU or a bad powersupply.

In other cases like bad hdd or ram the machine can crash or reboot but should still turned on.

4

Also, voltage or amperage drop by PSU or the components on mainboard can lead to a shutdown.
And not always that is deductable from logs.

5

Right, thanks for the responses. I did not find anything specific in the logs. The hardware monitoring on this specific device is not great. I doesn’t support ACPI or typical monitoring one would expect. This is not an issue only that this specific firewall is not a critical resource, or production scope, but a simple interval layer of security. It is monitored for IPS and other attacks, but not for hardware events. I just wanted to confirm that the logs don’t explicitly note anything on restart, other than the firewall came back up of course.