Well after all that….. It turned out that it was in fact the new network cable from the servers NIC2 port to the switch. I changed the cable for another new cable and hey presto all singing all dancing  :) Incidentally i'm struggling to get services through the firewall and after following numerous tutorials i'm still non the wiser but that's a different issue. Thanks for your help.

no guide. you can find bits an pieces around the forum if you look for it. chances are very small you'll get a build working for a random arm device, but do keep us updated :)

Is it set to BIOS or UEFI?  PFsense doesn't do UEFI yet, so you have to use BIOS (Or legacy or what ever Dell call it)

@b00rishev: The issue is getting IP addresses allocated to the WAN and LAN NICs. I either get one or the other. Sounds like you got the scope wrong and connected both LAN and WAN to your switch. Do it this way: Zyxel –- pfSense WAN | pfSense LAN --- SWITCH --- computers, printers, APs, etc. Only WAN gets an IP from the Zyxel (as long as that one is not in bridged mode). Set IP for LAN manually. Must be different from IP-on-WAN settings, completely different subnet. pfSense is a router. It can only route between different networks. Otherwise it would be a bridge/switch.

Update: After a reboot the update completed. Seems the swap partition filled up… Regards, Joachim

DNS issue… It s working now...

If your WAN1 gateway is down hard for the duration, I would just make the WAN2 gateway the default gateway until WAN1 is back up. Any of these remarkable checkboxes checked on either of your gateways?  

Yeah it can do some strange things since the terminal type doesn't match exactly. It installs fine regardless. FWIW I am having much better luck selecting vt100 in the new installer on 2.4 (in beta) using kermit on a mac..

Sam, The below threads may be a different issue but several people couldn't upgrade directly to 2.3.4_1…it kept trying to download 2.3.4 which was no longer on the web site.  The "fix" process might work to get yours looking at the right version. https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=125873.msg695386#msg695386 ref. from https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=134042.msg736575

Are you sure that you have properly set your Proliant UEFI options (ex. "any linux" is activated, even if it's not linux at all ) ? Do you have the same Proliant model and the latest UEFI BIOS is installed?

Just affirming phil's instructions that you can edit the interface names fairly easily in the .xml config file; I just did my last soekris->sg-xxx upgrade and this time instead of going the console method I just saved (backup) the prior configuration, edited the xml file to change the <if>blah</if> entries as appropriate, then restored from that modified configuration onto the new hardware. Worked fine. I would resist the temptation to change anything else that you don't need to change "while you are there". I started to reorganize my choice of opt1 vs opt2 etc and quickly realized that had many other implications (e.g., rules); so of course I reverted all that and started over with discipline to just update for the emX -> igbX changes. Which method (console vs edit the xml file) you prefer seems to be a matter of preference; both are pretty simple.

There has been a lot of discussion about this but I don't see any advantage in using PCI passthrough. VMware have their view of course and you can take that whatever way you want  ;)

One word of wisdom:  Make sure both devices are on the same patch level. I did not heed this wisdom and found out the hard way how difficult it was to re-import the settings.  I don't remember which versions I did this with, but it was a few in between. I recently did a pfSense hardware migration following the above advice, and it went flawlessly.  In my case the interfaces lined up perfectly.

Hi johnpoz, probs approaching 500 all in but its a great build. slightly on the noisy side as most 1U's are but loaded it up with lots of heavy traffic, and its basically still at idle, which is fantastic! In the end i did wipe the hardware raid and go with the pfsense mirror, worked first time, very impressed. Will be putting it live tonight so will keep you all updated, all settings are in place just waiting for the network to quieten down so i can make the switch, hope it goes nice and smoothly.

I did what was recommended. Removed the raid in bios and did a gmirror in the installer. Working a treat, thanks chaps! My Modem arrived earlier so I've got all the settings in place for the swap over later this evening, hoping it will go smoothly. Will let you know :D Enabled the CPU tempreture built in widget and its showing theres no values? any ideas? It isn't connected up to the wan yet so not sure if its gonna pull some files down once its connected along with some updates? (i hope its as easy as that)

@mrrodge: I tried to boot again and again, using the FreeBSD options for other kernels, none of which worked.  Starting to panic that it was the SSD failing, I downloaded the USB installer and used the option 'Rescue Config.xml', which said it succeeded, BUT, where the hell does it rescue the xml to?!  I tried booting a live CD for GhostBSD and mounted the USB, the Config file isn't there. The "Rescue config.xml" option reads the configuration from the drive into memory, and then copies it back to the target drive when installing. To use it when swapping in a new disk, you'd have to have the old disk and new disk both connected, then pick the old disk to rescue from and choose the new disk when installing. If it worked, the new drive would have the configuration in the proper place after the installation finishes and it would come back up properly afterward. The down side is that on 2.3.x and before, that option was not very robust. You'd have to try it 2-3x or more before it would work, if it worked at all. I've rewritten how it works in the new 2.4 installer and it now works every time I've tried it. That said, if the old drive really is dead, it still couldn't help.

Thanks, I will try.

@heper: https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Upgrade_Guide#pfSense_2.3_Upgrade_Guide read that very carefully. lots of stuff has changed from 2.2.x –> 2.3.x Thank you. I have already read that and was looking for user input in their experience.

It isn't a supported upgrade path. If you have a 64-bit system, you will want to reinstall with a full installation anyhow. 2.4 doesn't support NanoBSD, and requires 64-bit. So you need to get to a full install and away from NanoBSD while also switching to a 64-bit install. Currently that can only be done via a wipe+reinstall.