Having pfSense Recognize a USB Ethernet Adapter at boot time...

[acanicio]

@Gertjan
Hello, and thank you for your reply.

I know pfSense is not hiding on the net, but I get a 403 error (Forbidden) when I tried to access the "old" folder in the pfSense download section.

Finally I found pfSense CE 2.3.5 i386 on http://linorg.usp.br/pfsense/downloads/

My VXL Itona does not accept booting from usb keys but accepts usb cd-rom drives.

I use a a Zalmann ZM-VE300 external drive enclosure that emulates an optical drive from any ISO file that is stored in the hdd.
With this great tool I don't use USB keys anymore.

I found out that I could not install the software simply because it was not patient enough. It was taking so much time I kept on thinking it had crashed.

So yesterday I waited a little longer and the "Install" option appeared finally 6 minutes after booting from USB.

Installation went flawlessly, and as a miracle, my TP-Link UE300 was recognized at boot time after having installed the Shellcmd package and added the "usbconfig -d 4.2 set_config 1" command as earlyshell.

I have completed both NICs' configuration and booted a couple of times without any problem.

So it does seem that version 2.3.5 solves the issue.

I finished at about 1AM last night, so I'll continue testing this evening when I get back from work.

Thank you again for your effective help !

P.S. I said I'm a "Unix" noob, not a computer noob... it's been my job for over 30 years and I almost never had the occasion to work on Unix based systems, only Bull mainframes (GCOS-7) and Windows Server platforms.

I'm cannot stand seeing obsolete (but perfectly working) hardware being sent to the bin just because it's obsolete. So every time I can, I recover it for free and with a little soldering/modding/upgrading I find new uses for them.
I have a couple of projects with these little thin clients (I salvaged 6 of them). One of them was making a decent firewall/proxy/router. This is now on the right path.

The others will serve as video surveillance or automation control units for my future house. I managed to install Windows XP on them. They perfectly do the job with (also obsolete) salvaged usb webcams plugged in and home made software.

Best regards

[stephenw10]

Nice.

You should be able to use the hw.usb.quirk loader variable to do that rather then a shellcmd. Did you try that in 2.3.5?

Using the shellcmd does store it in the config file though.

Steve

[acanicio]

Dear @stephenw10,

I had tried this in version 2.1.5.
I will then try it in version 2.3.5 also.

Thank you !

Best regards
Axel

[Cybermancer]

I found a solution to this.

In my setup, I use a script to determine the USB device in case it changes, but here is the gist of it.

In the config.xml file, I added an entry at the end of the <system> block: <earlyshellcmd>usbconfig -d 0.2 set_config 1</earlyshellcmd>

This means that when the system starts up, it enables the USB device, so that if you bind that Ethernet adapter to an Interface, it doesn't freak-out during boot and ask you to set up the interfaces again.

The script I use does a grep to find the ugen address of the Realtek USB device, then passes that value into the -d argument.

This has been tested with pfSense 2.5.1

FYI, here is my script, I have a couple of Realtek adapters attached, so this adds all of them:

#!/bin/sh
IDs=$(usbconfig list | grep Realtek | sed -r 's/ugen([0-9]\.[0-9]).*/\1/')
for ID in $IDs
do
        usbconfig -d $ID set_config 1
done

[Gertjan]

@cybermancer said in Having pfSense Recognize a USB Ethernet Adapter at boot time...:

In the config.xml file, I added an entry at the end of the <system> block: <earlyshellcmd>usbconfig -d 0.2 set_config 1</earlyshellcmd>

Editing manually ?
What about the mini pfSense package :

[Cybermancer]

@gertjan I guess that works too. I like to live in shell land. But for everyone else, that's probably the way to go

[Cybermancer]

@acanicio Sorry, I gave your original post another read, and it seems that what I typed was similar to yours.

The script I wrote did initially fail after reboot, but now it seems to work fine (no idea why).

One thing I noticed that was extremely annoying was that when I booted up without a keyboard, the id was 0.2, but when I booted with a keyboard attached (regardless of the USB port used), the ID would change to 0.3 and 0.2 was taken by the keyboard.

Hopefully, that script should work as its a tad more dynamic. But I have 2 USB Ethernet adapters connected that seems to work perfectly over several reboots... I hope it holds out as the rest of the config applied would be an absolute pain to reload.

[Cybermancer]

This seems to have been fixed in the latest (2.5.2) release. Spent ages trying to diagnose it, but once I disabled the shellcmd command I entered (and replaced the adapter with a new one as this one may have been killed), everything works beautifully again.

[Danilo Souza Sampaio]

@cybermancer Muito obrigado, exatamente! Thank you!

[soloviento]

@cybermancer Hy cybermancer i'm in this case to. Could you explain your operating mode for the script?