How to restore PFsense config if it fails?
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Hello,
I wonder if there is any tool or any kind of help when you restore the config, but it doesn't succeed due to an error.
Just imagine I don't know what the error is all about and the support here can't help with it.
I don't have a simple setup, so a complete configuration from scratch would take me days, including testing...
As of now, I like to keep screenshots of necessary things, plus a step by step procedure of what needs to be done.Tipical scenario: I break my FW, I need to buy a new machine, that new machine has less eth ports, therefore, I think it will fail the restore process.
I can still read the xml, but it's not comfortable if you need to do everything from scratch manually :D .Another interesting fact is that I don't touch the network setup often (even if I should), any knowledge gained are easily faded out with the time...
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All you have to do is download your config and use it when you reinstall.
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If there are fewer NICs in the new machine you will need re-assign some interfaces when you import the config.
If you have a mix of subinterfaces, VLANs, PPPs VPNs etc it can be easier to edit the config in advance to use the NIC names in the new hardare.Steve
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When I changed the computer I run pfsense on, I just used the old config and updated it to account for the different NICs. I also had 4 now, compared to 3 before. Easy enough to do. Even my IPv6 prefix survived.
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Yeah if you go to hardware with more NICs you just have to re-assign the interfaces to the new names. If the NICs use the same driver you wouldn't even have to do that.
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The old box had 3 different makes, 1 Intel. The new computer has 4 Intel.
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In most configs you can simply reassign them in the gui and away you go. But you can imagine how that might not be so easy if you have, say, a lagg pair of NICs with VLANs on that and a PPPoE WAN on one of those.
Editing the config directly can be easier in that situation. Though it also opens the possibility of user error.Steve
