ok, i figured it out.  Basically just formatted a flash drive fat32, copied the config.xml to /conf/config.xml and ran a fresh install.  It seems to have pulled the data from the .xml file into the new install automatically.  After the reboot i unplugged the flash drive and it booted up complete with the WAN, lan, VPN, etc configs intact.

An NMI error is almost certainly hardware (non-maskable interrupt, generally indicative of an unrecoverable hardware error), and those that are not hardware are due to some interaction with the BIOS, so still related to the hardware.

It's possible you have some incompatibility with that hardware or BIOS and FreeBSD, or it could be a hardware failure.

Just going to put this out there:

My network needed to be majorly redone in order to reduce complexity.  That is, remove VLANs, make configurations more 'sane', and condense networking down to one switch and many VLANs.

Five hours later of beating my head on Cisco switch configs and Ubiquity wifi controllers and access points to get everything talking around the network properly, it works.  I'm now fully on a virtualized pfSense appliance.  I might fiddle around with upgrading the APU in-place, but that's a long time in the future.  My network now operates with the newly-configured pfSense VM.

Thanks for your advice to point at the "redo it with a VM" solution, it actually is responding faster now than it did before.  (AND the VLAN trunks all work without issue!  :D)

Hi AndyC,

That was the case, thanks!

Fairly new to the Linux world, seems to me lots of stuff are version 0.xx and suggest not fully stable, regardless there are only 2 choices for pFsense right, NUT or APCUPSD. Try them and see if they work for you.

Am using APCUPSD and notice there are lots of parameters to configure and haven't had the patience to fine tune mine to make sure it works as expected as my power outs are rare and power usually comes back before battery runs out.  APCUPSD master-slave is relatively simple. the Master is configured just like a standalone. And the Slaves, instead of listening to a cable (serial/usb) are configured as NET and poll the Master at intervals for status.

@Gertjan:

@kpa:

The tool that is used to write the image file makes no changes at all to the image nor does it make decisions on how to create partitions on the destination device, the image is written on the memory stick exactly as it is including a new partition table, that's why the partitions are "created" during the writing process.

Humm, I stand corrected then.
So the "USB Memstick Installer" already contains all this info ?
And it that case, it's prepared by "pfSEnse" when it is build.

Yes, the image when written on a USB memory stick replaces the contents of the stick completely including any existing partitions, the new partition table is included in the image file and written to destination disk verbatim . In theory it would be possible to prepare images that are written on existing partitions but it's too complicated to prepare such images in a way that they would be easily usable for everyone. That's why the installer images are meant to be written on the whole disk.

192.168.x.y range are non routable.
Having that on your WAN interface is bad.

Dated comp is not a problem, I installed and ran on a 15 years old single core Pentium3. My feeling is, pFsense works good with generic, non-custom PC, and you did not volunteer what brand, if any, this dated PC is, and Mr. Obvious would want to now, if this PC a WORKING PULLED, meaning it was working perfectly right before you decided to install pFsense or it, or you just found something at the garage sale with unknown history?

Just noticed the badly photoshopped antenna removal from that image.  ::)

Steve

@Gertjan:

I'd would like an explanation of this one :

route add default y.y.y.y

Although the OP mentioned this in terms of DNS resolution, it's more basic.  It adds (temporarily) a default IP route (aka default gateway).  Without routes you won't reach anything, let alone an upstream DNS server[1].  Drilling down further, you'd also want to verify that your WAN interface has a valid IP address, netmask and is UP.  Useful checks:

[1]<pedantic>unless they're on local subnets</pedantic>

The supported solution there is to backup your config, re-install to the SSD and restore the config. Then you can increase the log file sizes significantly.

Running two disks (other than as a mirror) is not a supported configuration but it can be done. You need to mount the other drive at boot. fstab may be overwritten. If you use the syslog-ng package you can specify the log location and then export the logs to it from the logging settings.

I'd choose option 1 though.  ;)

Steve

i fixed by running "pfSense-upgrade" command. It saw kernel needed updating still and pushed it through.

I sent a support request to Netgate and I very quickly received an RMA to return it to them - I'm impressed, I wasn't expecting such a rapid response.  I'm going to Fed-Ex it back to them.

The speed at which the RMA came though suggests to me that they think it's a hardware issue, not a software issue.  I'm happy to say that it's out of my hands now and I can get back to my day job - LOL.

One of the best things I ever did was REPLACE Cisco/Linksys RV042s with pfSense.

I would boot from a 2.3.5 USB drive. Don't reinstall.

You should be able to mount the disk using the emergency shell, edit the file, then boot from the disk.

Might be easier to just install 2.3.5, edit the file, upgrade to 2.4.2, and restore a config backup if you are not familiar with how to do all of that.