pfSense Community Update: radiusd won't start in GUI


I've used pfSense in certain parts of my network for several years now. While there is occasionally a hiccup, most of the time the product works perfectly for my needs. Today I updated my installations to the latest update which re-brands the web console as "pfSense Community Edition". After the update I was unable to start the Radius service via the web console.

Work-around

A little investigation and a work around was found:

  • SSH into the pfSense appliance
  • Select Option 8 to get a shell
  • Execute this command to start radiusd:

    /usr/local/etc/rc.d/radiusd onestart 

 

Troubleshooting

If you try to run the above command using start instead of onestart, you might get a message like this:

[2.3-RELEASE][admin@pfSenseBoxName.domain.tld]/: /usr/local/etc/rc.d/radiusd start
Cannot 'start' radiusd. Set radiusd_enable to YES in /etc/rc.conf or use 'onestart' instead of 'start'.

Apparently, this message means that the rc.conf file does not have an entry for radiusd. Interestingly enough, the rc.conf file is *not* located in /etc/rc.conf as described in the message, either.

To get around this, use the command listed above in the work-around section.

I attempted to alter the rc.conf file located at /etc/defaults/rc.conf, but could not be sure this was correct or would work in pfSense. Seeing as one of my long-standing issues with pfSense has been that the radius server does not restart when the appliance is rebooted, having to ssh in and start it up is not a huge break in my workflow (before this update I would restart after authenticating via the web console, so using SSH isn't instead isn't terrible.