Lately my system has been freezing and completely unresponsive. ctrl+alt+backspace, reisub, nothing works and I have to hard reset. I found some logs, syslog, and have posted a few leading up to the freeze. They’re all from ProtonVPN (I’m on beta). I’m hoping there’s something I can do without just not using ProtonVPN, assuming proton is the culprit. Can anyone make sense of this?

I don’t know how much of this info should be private so I redacted some, timezone, pc name, mac, ports.

2025-12-12T11:09:27.835680TIME MYPC protonvpn-app[4792]: 2025-12-12T15:09:27.835612+00:00 | proton.vpn.local_agent/port_forwarding.rs:225 | INFO | Receiving Response { version: 0, operation: 130, response_code: 0, gateway_epoch_seconds: 4116943, internal_port: REDACTED, external_port: REDACTED, lifetime_seconds: 60 }
2025-12-12T11:09:28.257753TIME MYPC protonvpn-app[4792]: 2025-12-12T15:09:28.257690+00:00 | proton.vpn.session.utils:112 | INFO | API:RESPONSE | '/feature/v2/frontend'
2025-12-12T11:09:28.258827TIME MYPC protonvpn-app[4792]: 2025-12-12T15:09:28.258799+00:00 | proton.vpn.core.refresher.feature_flags_refresher:94 | INFO | Next feature flag refresh scheduled in 1:39:23.178147
2025-12-12T11:09:32.026373-04:00 MYPC kernel: [UFW BLOCK] IN=proton0 OUT= MAC= SRC=REDACTED DST=REDACTED LEN=60 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=54 ID=30062 PROTO=TCP SPT=REDACTED DPT=REDACTED WINDOW=29200 RES=0x00 SYN URGP=0 
2025-12-12T11:32:17.244594TIME MYPC systemd-modules-load[957]: Inserted module 'lp'

Edit: The log includes the first entry after rebooting at 11:32. The system clock froze at 11:09:55, 22 seconds after the kernel entry.

Edit 2: There a whole bunch of entries prior to the ones I posted, all very similar mentioning proton and most with UFW block, for example:

2025-12-12T11:07:12.127370-04:00 MYPC kernel: [UFW BLOCK] IN=proton0 OUT= MAC= SRC=REDACTED DST=REDACTED LEN=52 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=116 ID=9565 PROTO=TCP SPT=REDACTED DPT=REDACTED WINDOW=65535 RES=0x00 SYN URGP=0

I’m realizing now the reference to Proton is just my connection.

Edit 3: If I’m reading this stuff correctly, a bunch of UFW BLOCK happened before the crash. Assuming SRC is the source IP, they’re all different. Assuming DPT is the port they’re trying to access, they’re all the same ProtonVPN port. There are more but between 11:01:32 and 11:09:32 there were 24 UFW blocks.

Edit 4: Froze again while messing around with my firewall. I had installed Firewall Configuration a little while ago to figure out some server stuff. No idea if it had anything to do with it, but I’ve deleted that and reset my ufw. I found one post online talking about firewall packets freezing their Arch system, so I’m wondering if that’s the root cause, I’m not great with network stuff haha. I’ve also installed fail2ban to block multiple ip attempts. Only weird thing now is previously my firewall had port numbers and stuff, and now it’s 0s like:

Allow incoming 0.0.0.0 ssh (0/TCP)

Allow incoming :: ssh (0/TCP)

Allow incoming 0.0.0.0 dhcpv6-client (0/TCP) etc.

No idea if that’s normal

    • data1701d (He/Him)@startrek.websiteEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      Alright then. That probably eliminates the lp thing. Can I ask: what journalctl command (or logging command in general, if not journalctl) did you use? I’d recommend giving the results of journalctl -b -1 -p 3 and dmesg.

      Also, it’d probably be a good idea to tell us what ports are getting blocked; that shouldn’t be personally identifying in any way. After doing research on what those ports are and what ProtonVPN requires, try experimenting with unblocking some of them if you can; a blocked port shouldn’t crash your system, but it’s worth a shot.

      I might also recommend looking at a task manager, just to make sure some application isn’t taking up all your memory and causing the system to freeze.

      Finally, take a look at your CPU temps in case this is some kind of cooling failure.

        • data1701d (He/Him)@startrek.websiteEnglish
          2·
          3 months ago

          If you scroll down in journalctl, it can go later in time. Also, you can check different boots by changing the b parameter, with -b 0 being the current boot, -b -1 being the previous boot, b -2 being the boot before that, etcetera.

          For UFW, I’d just try unblocking the Proton ports if it says they’re blocked in Proton settings. Also, check to make sure you don’t have two firewalls installed; while this once again shouldn’t crash the system, my PC did some very weird things when both UFW and firewalld were installed.