Logging this one here. I had a good last few days of setup progress. Then sudden a reboot of pfsense and the boot stalled at “starting DNS resolver”.
After disabling packages and reverting to an old backup, the problem was still there. Eventually I realized before I had improperly shut down pfSense about 3 days ago when I powered off the rack and forgetting to shut down the firewall, it created an issue with /var/unbound/pfb_dnsbl.conf
Ultimately, the solution was to remove it and create an empty file, probably corrupted during hard-power off:
cp /var/unbound/pfb_dnsbl.conf /root/ && rm /var/unbound/pfb_dnsbl.conf && touch /var/unbound/pfb_dnsbl.conf
Then reboot.
Then also switch to “unbound python mode” which uses SQLite instead of text file:
Disable the DNS relay logging (extra disk IO/CPU)
Ref: