It's normal, just disregard it. Common thing to see with FreeBSD, google it for more info if you're interested.

@afunez2010: I read the upgrade guide, and see that i have to backup my configs, and then install the new version and restore my backup!! No you don't, that's not what it says. Follow the instructions under "Full installation" here. http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Upgrade_Guide

When the interface mismatch screen comes up at boot, just make sure you assign as many interfaces as you had previously assigned and none of your rules will disappear.

You write the 1G image to 1GB flash memory, the 2GB image to 2GB flash memory and so on. Use the LiveCD installer to install on regular hard drives.

I have also had this problem see my post here http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,24753.msg128448.html#msg128448 replacing the mbr fixes the boot for me. you should see some indication of booting on the screen, I always get a backslash with blinking cursor then the text BTX loader 1.00   BTX version is 1.02 everything else goes out on the serial port. .

I have sorta done this, 1. write embedded image to CF card, try to boot from card in USB to CF card adapter    got blinking cursor of death. 2. open CF card with hex editor and replace the first 446 bytes (1BEh) of the    MBR with the MBR found in /boot/mbr on the freebsd 8.0-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.iso    CD. that fixed the boot I also just tested installing from the pfsense cd to a usb thumb drive after install finished and booting from the USB drive, I made it to setup network interfaces, so I think it will work. EDIT: I wrote pfsense 1.2.3 embeded release to the thumb drive, when booting from it I got the blinking cursor of death, so I replaced the mbr with the mbr found on freebsd 8.0-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.iso /boot/mbr with a hexeditor then I was able to boot and get to the config network interfaces screen. you can also decompress the embeded image and delete the first 32,256 bytes from the image and write it to your drive, which seems to work also.

@jimp: DHCP is enabled by default. Is it possible you have the WAN and LAN cables reversed? Unfortunately not, I've tried switching the NIC's around and tried switching the cables around without success. Have since also tried Monowall to see if it is pfSense specific and I'm having the same problem there also (not surprising since pfSense is a Monowall fork). I've tried 3 different network cards so it doesnt appear to be related to the NIC's, all appear to be detected and installed correctly. I assume it can only be a hardware issue? But it seems werid that the mobo/cpu/memory would only affect DHCP on one interface.

@danswartz: No offense, but I don't think you will get a lot of free troubleshooting with installing an old, obsolete release for a problem which is only theoretical in your case. You can even take the "in your case" part out, where ever that info is coming from is wrong - QoS hasn't changed since before 1.2.1 release, same config code in 1.2.2 and 1.2.3, no diff aside from the minor FreeBSD version change which didn't change things related to that. To install on something with less than 2 NICs, just type "exit" at the prompt to assign LAN.

Yeah either way can be tricky in that situation. If you can't find your null modem cable you can still go the other route.

http://doc.pfsense.com

version 1.2.1 does the same. versions later than 1.2.2 all fail to mount the cd on boot. Same symptoms when booting monowall. device names tried:  fd0, fdc0, disk0, /dev/fd0  all fail. must be a bsd thing.

@mhab12: Nothing special to do besides make sure that your LAN subnet is different from the WAN subnet - i.e. set your lan to 10.21.x.x thanks for the reply! Works like a champ. Second pfsense rollout and everything went well. Man i love this distro!

I've got a couple installs on InnoDisk IDE DOMs running full installs, and my home testing install which gets reinstalled frequently from 2.0 snapshots. All of these have been stable running for at least 18 months, the oldest is about 24 months with no issues. Industrial flash is designed to be used this way, I doubt you'll have any problems with proper industrial flash modules, be it CF, IDE/SATA DOM or SSD.

You do need to disable DMA, this is what I id with 1.2 FYI though, 2.0rc does not install on microdrives with CF adapters and just bombs with geom errors :(

Super Secret Trick: type "exit" at the network card assignment prompt and it will continue through to the menu Though pressing 'i' at the install/rescue countdown prompt early in the CD boot will work too

pfSense is a "stand alone" OS.  It uses FreeBSD as it's base.  You install it on it's own real, or virtual, machine. Cheers.

It could be something specific to that disk or BIOS. You might try to do a low level format of the entire disk before installing to see if that makes any difference.

Thank You! I was able to install the upgrade with no problems…Jon