Thanks a lot for the quick response, that's exactly what I did. 'Upgrade from console' option in ssh menu works great.

Bad hardware sucks…  Can really have you pulling your hair out.

@acrane: Hey, I have a pf firewall that is being used in a production environment, that has a few hundred IPs configured and a lot of rules. The box needs replacing and I thought I would switch to pfsense s I've been using it at home and love it. I was wondering if there was any way to convert/import the pf.conf file so that pfsense could use it. You could do this yourself with a text editor and some macros (or vi). Just create a rule in the UI so that you can look at how it gets saved in the config.xml file (see /conf/config.xml). From there you can figure out how to take your list and manually create the additional entries in the config.xml file. Depending on what you've got and how good you are with macros it might be easier than entering all of them in the UI. Once you put the new config.xml in place, reboot and pfSense will pickup the changes.

There is no such guide that I'm aware of. If you write one, it may live here on the forum, perhaps as a sticky. I'm not sure that's a practice we'd want to actively encourage through putting it on the wiki, since there is quite a lot of room for error when making any changes to the config, especially automated changes.

You probably need to restore your settings…  Worse case, set pfsense to default and reconfigure.  If you have done it once successfully, second time should be very fast.  Also, make sure you set up DNS.  People often think they have no internet but really they do. If you open the gateway monitor, is it online or offline?

Out of interest why did you choose 'pass' the first time? Create associated rule is the default setting. Also you may find that your servers appear to all use the same public IP for outgoing traffic unless you set manual outbound NAT rules. Steve

@jimp: You'd need to run a packet capture watching for connections to your firewall on port 8443, and see what the source IP of the traffic ends up being there. i finally found it was my spiceworks network scanner, that was scanning the pfsense, and causing the error in the logs.

Stephen10 - I was forced to add the additional virtual WANs because I really would rather have use VIPs but had no idea how to get them to work because the ISP was binding to MACs and when I tried the VIP route they wouldn't give me an IP.  Stingy guys….

The captive portal works at layer 2 so if you have problem at layer 3, ip address - routing etc, the captive portal is likely the only thing you will see. Check that the pfSense DHCP server is handing out the correct IP address etc. I confess that I don't use the captive portal anyway currently so I'm perhaps not the right person to answer this. Anyone else? I'm not sure what you mean by 'ath0-WAN'. You should have one WAN, alc0, and one LAN, ath0. Steve

@Chucko: On this hardware, is there any benefit to installing the amd64 version of pfSense? Probably only if you have more than 3GB RAM.

I love a good pfSense story.  Glad it worked out, it's only going to get better.

Cheers kejianshi.  I owe you lunch man.  Be excited that your knowledge made the light turn on  ;D

I second the "bad drive" diagnosis - though it could be RAM, power, heat, etc. If it always crashes in the exact same place every single time, it's probably the HDD.

@kejianshi: Yes - I have a Bank Routing Number and Account Number for expressing appreciation… I only take beer… so, if you manage to set up beer-over-ip tunnel, I'll be happy to be your guest. :D

Well if you are happy I'm happy.  If you picked solid drives I'm sure it will be fine.

Hi Jimp, I was surprised as well, as the previous one went flawless. No errors seen. I was not monitoring console, everything went through webgui. Did not bother to go looking in the logs, as it looked to be set to factory defaults? I just went through my syslog (pfSense nano seems to be limited to 2000 entries), no errors. Judging by the log, all went fine. If you are really curious, I can send or attach part of my syslog server entries. There is still the part of upgrade until reboot after upgrade. I'm missing part of course where the pfSense's IP range was wrong (default), up to where I have done the restore. If you want other info, I'll be happy to provide any log you want, just let me know. PS: don't know if it is related, but while checking those logs, I just noticed I have a new issue: lots of NSSWITCH entries in my syslog  ??? I seem to remember that was reported here by other users, need to check… [edit: not related & already fixed by your workaround from april 26th 2013]

Very brief: Typically, each IBM blade has at least 2 onboard nics (even without mezzanine boards installed) -> the blade connects to the backplane -> the backplane connects to the I/O modules. Given your description, it looks like your bladecenter is equipped with a CISCO Catalyst switch, so you need to configure the switch to map the vlans to the nics. The CISCO will have many internal interfaces (at least 2 per blade), and a few external. You will need to find the corresponding nics from the blade (they will represent an interface on the switch, depending on the location of the blade in the chassis), and configure the switch so they end up in the correct vlan. If you can log into the bladecenter's MM, you can find the IBM part numbers from bladecenter, blade, and I/O module installed. Google those numbers, download the manuals. IBM has pretty good illustrations in its manuals, it should give you a better view on your setup. hope it makes sense…

@asimioni: or convert to iso OMG. If you want ISO, then download the ISO. Not IMG (which is raw HDD image).

I'm always amazed when people say "SNORT" and "Embedded" or "nano" in the same sentence… However, saying thats not the brightest move to make will invite 1000 HERO members to come prove me wrong. Still, I think its asking for aggravation.  Even so far as squid goes, its an annoyance. BUT - People do make it work every day here...  So, its far from impossible. (P.S.  There are litterally volumes of threads on this site of people going round and round with packages and squid and the way caching is handled and every single one of those people, for the most part, is trying to do something that a single HDD and a full install will knock out, no problem.  Electricity would have to get DAMN expensive for me to go that route at my house.  The 1 guy I really understood needing this so far was a guy who was running totally off solar out in the middle of nowhere in Nepal or something.  Him I understand.  He is on a power diet.  Or in very hot non-air-conditioned environment.  I saw some Russian guys having this problem.  They refer to their HDD replacements as "The next victim")

@draccusfly: So disconnected the 4 ports from the HW firewall, connected the ports on the pfsense and reset the IP address in the LAN interface to match that of the H/W firewall. The IP address changed from … to ... ? (It was my experience that some major configuration changes seem to require a restart to completely clear out the old details.) @draccusfly: At this point the internet goes down and doesn't come back up, As seen where? from pfSense console? client computer connected to pfSense? @draccusfly: I cannot ping the LAN interface any more and generally bad things happen. What ping command did you use and what does ping report? @draccusfly: Why do things change so much with just an IP address switch?, If you want a detailed explanation you will need to provide more details of your configuration and how it changed. @draccusfly: So disconnected the 4 ports from the HW firewall, connected the ports on the pfsense This suggests you have at least three "LAN" ports on the pfSense box. Unless these ports are bridged you will need to add firewall rules on the ports that aren't THE pfSense LAN port to allow traffic. (The default pfSense configuration is to allow connections arriving on the LAN interface and block connections arriving on the other interfaces.)