HP DL360 Gen9, 2.8 upgrade no good in UEFI mode. Tried upgrades (2.7.2) and fresh installs, all matter of EFI BIOS switches, BIOS console settings, clearing EFI boot entries, 'boot'ing from the boot menu CLI, even fresh SSDs. Hard auto-reboot at the EFI framebuffer section after BSD boot selector screen each time. Finally switched to Legacy Mode and it worked. This is a FreeBSD issue, not Netgate's. Come on, BSD, it's 2025! Legacy mode? At least my NICs were still recognized. Other than that it's a bog standard DL360 with current firmware. Probably this issue: https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/15074

Did several VM based installs at remote sites no problems. This was the first of the bare metal ones.

p.s. And not having an real install .iso is getting annoying. I could see where recovering from a cold start could be challenging in some environments.

@stephenw10

I can access the available packages and install with no issues. Installed Wireguard and System_Patches no problem.

@NetworkTechie said in Installing on Protectli V1610: No network after first boot, and read only console.:

But after rebooting from setup into the freshly installed instance of PFsense on the NVMe, the IP will be unreachable a

While the console output, still attached and active, that a reboot was in progress, the USB drive from which you installed pfSense, was removed, right ?

What 'IP' is unreachable ?
You mean the LAN interface ?

@NetworkTechie said in Installing on Protectli V1610: No network after first boot, and read only console.:

and will display a setup webpage on other hosts on the network, during the setup.

A setup page ? What does it show ?

@NetworkTechie said in Installing on Protectli V1610: No network after first boot, and read only console.:

No matter if i put both the WAN and LAN interface on DHCP, or set a static IP address.

Valid for 'everybody' :
WAN == dhcpc or DHCP - the DHCP client process will request a lease-WAN-IP for you from somewhere 'upstream'.
LAN : set it to static IP address like 1992.168.1.1 /24 or 255.255.255.0 and set up a DHCP - server, this time - a pool from 192.168.1.10 to 192.168.1.200
Done.
For experts : dozens of (far) less common setups are possible.
Although :
dhcp client on LAN ? Never saw that one before.
dhcp server in WAN ? same thing.

@NetworkTechie said in Installing on Protectli V1610: No network after first boot, and read only console.:

Now the Protectli V1610 does have a USB-C console port, as well as a HDMI port, and both show the console output for PFsense. But the console cannot be interacted with, and seems to be logging only.

When you install pfSense, what version ? their might be a choice to make :
Serial console ?
or
Video+keyboard console ?
It's possible that at first the BIOS uses the serial console - and then later on, while booting, pfSense uses the video mode.
Or the other way around.

@NetworkTechie said in Installing on Protectli V1610: No network after first boot, and read only console.:

igc4: link state changed to UP
igc0: link state changed to UP
igc0: link state changed to DOWN

What's connected to igc0 ? If it's the LAN - connect this port to a switch, and connect all your LAN devices (PC's AP's printers etc etc etc to this switch). You really want to be sure the LAN 'never' goes down.
Same thing for the WAN btw, connect it to an upstream 'other (ISP ?) router or modem etc.

@NetworkTechie said in Installing on Protectli V1610: No network after first boot, and read only console.:

Or will pfSense CE not run at all on this hardware?

edit : Oh, wait, didn't saw the other replies. Sorry if I lost the subject.

I never saw a "Protectli " device IRL but they are quiet known. Check their web site again : I'll bet they say that their devices support 'pfSense' (whatever version).

Thank you @stephenw10. That worked for me also.

No the loader file isn't included in config file.

You could add it using the filer package but you don't have to. You can always set that hint at the loader prompt to allow the system to boot before adding the file again.

That's almost certainly it. The code to update the bootloader is new, it wouldn't have run at previous updates.

Hmm, I use Proxmox and have some VMs running UEFI. I haven't seen a problem.

What issue do you see trying to run the installer?

@stephenw10 that seems like a good guess at this point, reinstall and restore to prior config worked, CE 2.8 is running fine. Thanks everyone!

Yes,

I have serial port. Next time I will check report during boot without monitor attached.
I am interested to what's going on.

You can set a static DHCP lease but not set static ARP. Normally pfSense would just ARP for the IP and update the MAC in the table but if you mark it static things like this can happen. 😉

@jdeloach said in pfSense 2.8.0 full iso/img:

I was never able to upgrade to 2.7.x because of issues with FreeBSD that the BSD folks (all flavors) didn't want to continue to fix.

What issue was that?

Found the solution to disable wireless card from pfsense before installation.
https://forum.netgate.com/post/1214869

@stephenw10 said in Update to 2.8.0 always still starts 2.7.2:

Do you have an upgrade or boot log from the failing boot?

Unfortunately not. I took a different approach yesterday evening: Installed a fresh 2.7.2. (due to the lack of a 2.8.0 ISO), upgraded this without issues and then restored the saved config. Worked without issues.

Thanks for coming back to me.