I've been playing with OpenBSD for a little while now, and really love it when I need to throw together a quick firewall, web server, dhcp server, etc. I've got on firewall that I've been using for a little while now, OpenBSD 4.6, running on a VMWare ESXi box. It normally performs fine, and it is doing some NAT and firewall functions with PF. I've pushed quite a few packets through it and am impressed with the performance I am able to get out of it.
However, it seems like roughly every 2-3 weeks, I'll experience an issue with it where it will stop responding. I can still ping the machine, but it won't forward any packets, accept SSH connections, or respond to basically anything. If I check on my VMWare host machine it is showing 100% cpu utilization, and I am unable to access the console directly through VMWare. Performing a reset through VMWare fixes it and it runs fine again, for a few weeks, until the same problem occurs. After resetting the box I check out all the log files but I have never been able to see anything that even remotely seems relevant to what could have been happening. I know of no way to see what processes are running and eating up the cpu when this occurs, since I can't get it to respond to anything. I am hoping someone may be able to help point me in the right steps of where to begin troubleshooting this-- I am a fairly experienced Windows admin, but still pretty new to the BSD world, but am trying my best to adopt it wherever possible! Thanks in advance!
