We have been running pfSense as a Captive Portal for quite sometime. Lately, our flenses have had services that were locking up. You could view items on the GUI, but could not execute a Captive Portal lookup or a Halt System or Reboot System. And if you ssh'ed into the system, you could not execute either or a web configurator restart either.
On the particular system we had this happen to lately, we were using 1.2.1-RC2 and have had it happen on 1.2.2. We did recently upgrade to 1.2.3-PRERELEASE-TESTING-VERSION and have not had it up long enough to determine if this version had the same issue. This is the error that was in the /var/log/ lighttpd.error.log 2009-03-03 09:04:58: (mod_fastcgi.c.2956) backend died; we'll disable it for 5 seconds and send the request to another backend instead: reconnects: 0 load: 192 2009-03-03 09:04:59: (mod_fastcgi.c.3568) all handlers for /index.php on .php are down. This was on the monitor hooked up to the pfSense device IPFW: IPV6 - Unknown Extension Header(10), ext 2 IPFW: IPV6 - Unknown Extension Header(5), ext 2 Thanks
