I set this so that I might make better use of my ram and that it might provide slightly better performance. Following the instructions I checked the box and filled in the values for both ram and tmp ram disk. I set the values from the default to 1gb each. After rebooting I received messages that the /var was full.
This computer has 16gb of ram so I felt that 1 gb for each should be sufficient. Apparently not.
The defaults for those settings is 256 and 1024 meaning 256mb of ram for one and 1gb for the other. I’m not sure why it failed.
I accessed the terminal at the computer. At the console I could see that DHCP was not active as none of my interfaces were listed. The part near the top where it states the IP addresses for each interface/vlan was blank and I had repeated error messages about /var being full. I could not get the restore previous config to work so that left me with trying this at the command line.
I remembered some time ago that I had found a place in pfsense that held prior versions of the config. I couldn’t remember exactly. I hopped on my cellphone, disconnected from wifi (as that was not functional) and I searched for the location of these older config files. I found them at /cf/config and /cf/config/backup.
I changed to the folder /cf/config and made a copy of the config.xml to my home folder. I then entered the /cf/config/backup and found a version of the config.xml file that was annotated to be from earlier. I then copied this into the /cf/config folder with the name config.xml and rebooted the router.
This worked. I was back in action.
I’m still not sure what I did wrong. My guess is that /var just needed a whole bunch more space. I didn’t get any messages about /tmp.