Conectar
This is just a aftermath of my morning, hope it is a good read for you.
As a tech enthusiast, I take great pride in my homelab setup. It’s my personal slice of the internet where I experiment, learn, and run various services that I rely on. Everything was going smoothly—until that fateful morning when it all went dark.
The Alarm
It started innocently enough. In grabbed a cup of coffee was happy to have some relaxing time before the family comes for a visit on my day off. A notification popped up from my external monitoring service, bluntly telling me that my services were offline. My first thought? “The internet must be down.” I rushed to check my ISP's router—everything looked fine, green lights and all. So, the internet was up, but my network wasn't.
That’s when I turned my attention to the next logical suspect: my OPNsense firewall behind my ISP's router.
The Firewall Freakout
When I logged into the firewall, things were...off. Errors about buffers were splashed across the screen, making little sense to me at the time. I did what any sane person would do—reboot. But instead of a reboot solving everything, that’s when things really went downhill.
OPNsense refused to come back up. It was like it had taken the dive into oblivion and dragged my entire homelab down with it. Now it was time to roll up my sleeves.
The Hunt for HDMI and Keyboard
Of course, in moments like these, you realize just how long it’s been since you needed a wired keyboard or an HDMI cable. Cue the frantic search through drawers, boxes, and behind dusty shelves. Eventually, after what felt like an eternity, I found what I needed. HDMI cable and keyboard in hand, I hooked them up to the firewall.
The OPNsense box was stuck in the boot menu. Not good.
The Missing Interface Confusion
I hit “Enter,” hoping for a magic fix. Instead, OPNsense asked me to configure the interfaces manually, which didn’t make sense. Why was it asking for this? I hadn’t changed anything! Then came the cryptic message: "Missing default interface." The confusion deepened, but I decided to push forward and configure the WAN and LAN interfaces manually.
No dice. The WAN wouldn't come up. Something bigger was wrong, but what?
The Revelation: A Dead Interface
After fiddling with cables, checking connections, and wondering why nothing was working, I finally had a lightbulb moment: "Default interface missing" wasn’t just a random error—it was trying to tell me something important. I tested the cable, and it was fine. But the WAN interface on the firewall, the port itself, was dead. Gone. Finished.
And because that WAN interface was tied to the default interface (which OPNsense couldn’t find anymore), it threw everything into disarray. All my neatly ordered interfaces—LAN, WAN, and Management—were scrambled, causing chaos.
The Long Road to Recovery
At this point, I had no choice but to manually configure the interfaces. First, I moved the WAN from the dead port (igc0) to a working one (igc2). But since OPNsense uses interface names for everything, this caused even more confusion. All my old configs, VLANs, and link aggregation settings (LAG) were referencing the old interface names.
Worse yet, in my panic, I had overwritten all the local backups on the firewall at this point. My NAS backups were unreachable for now, and time was ticking. I had to start from scratch, manually piecing together my configurations like a digital jigsaw puzzle.
Slowly, Piece by Piece
Once I’d manually set up the WAN on a new port and reconfigured the LAG and VLANs that were critical for my network, I finally started to see some light at the end of the tunnel. The network slowly came back online. I could access my PC again, and my services began breathing new life.
The Aftermath and Learnings
In the end, it took me from 9:22 AM to 11:50 AM to fully recover. Thankfully, it was a day off, and I didn’t have any urgent work commitments. But it was a stressful experience that left me with a few important lessons:
- Hardware can fail at any time. I always thought, “Nah, this won’t happen to me.” It did. My WAN port just gave up on life. Never assume your hardware is invincible.
- Enable “Prevent Interface Deletion” for critical interfaces. This would have saved me so much grief by stopping the chaos that happened when OPNsense couldn’t find my WAN interface.
- Keep an up-to-date firewall backup on your PC or another easily accessible device. Relying on a NAS backup that you can't access is as good as not having one at all in these situations.
- Have a backup plan for your network infrastructure. I was fortunate I could switch on Wi-Fi on my ISP’s router if needed, but I’m now considering either a secondary firewall device or even a virtualized backup to step in if my primary hardware fails again.
Final Thoughts
No one likes when their homelab goes down, but it happens. This experience taught me that while it’s impossible to prevent every failure, you can make recovery smoother by planning ahead. With better backups, redundancy, and a plan B, future outages will (hopefully) be less stressful.
For now, the network is stable, but I’m keeping a much closer eye on my hardware, and this experience has me thinking: maybe it’s time to invest in some extra gear. After all, when you manage your own network, you are your own IT department, and no one likes being on the other end of a panicked support call—especially when it’s your own voice you’re hearing.
Now I am going back to my coffee, Family will arrive here in a bit.
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