PF states limit reached

[kaycee gb]

Le Fri, 2 Oct 2020 14:59:44 +0200,
Miroslav Lachman <000.fbsd at quip.cz> a écrit :

> I have many machines (physical and virtual) with PF running for years. 
> Few days back I started observing problem on one machine running in 
> headless VirtualBox (if it matters)
> 
> kernel: [zone: pf states] PF states limit reached
> 
> The problem is there are states inserts but states are never removed 
> (pfctl -s info shows 0 removals)
> 
> If I run "pfctl -s state | wc -l" the count is the same as shown by 
> "pfctl -s info | grep inserts". There are thousands of states after 30 
> minutes.
> 
> "netstat -an" show only about 90 connections in WAIT or CLOSED or 
> ESTABLISHED state.
> 
> Why PF does not remove all states? What can be wrong on this machine in 
> question?
> 
> My current workaround is to restart PF many times a day (or use pfctl -F 
> states)
> 
> pf.conf if relatively simple, just a basic rules to allow incomming 
> traffic for TCP services, allowing all outgoing traffic and some "set" 
> options:
> 
> set limit { states 200000, frags 5000 }
> set limit table-entries 900000
> set optimization aggressive
> set block-policy drop
> set loginterface $ext_if
> set skip on $unfiltered
> 
> scrub in  on $ext_if
> scrub out on $ext_if no-df random-id
> 
> 
> And the last question - is there any way to use PF as stateless 
> firewall? PF automatically add "keep state" to all rules, how can I 
> change this behavior to not add "keep state" on all or some rules?
> 
If you have a little set of rules, you can add a "no state" or "no-state" to
the rule, check in man page, I am not sure about the syntax right now. 

There may be also an option to change the default behaviour to not add "keep
state" automatically. Once again looking in man page may help. 

And that is strange, I agree, maybe some optimisation/option is the culprit.
But I don't know where to look. What version of FreeBSD are you using ? That
may help others
 
> Kind regards
> Miroslav Lachman
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K.