How to clone PFSense?

hoba

I think I have heard somewhere that somebody used acronis successfully.

Cry Havok

I can't provide detailed instructions, but if you throw something like "cloning disks with dd" into Google you'll get a few thousand hits.

Roughly:

Put both disks/cards into a single machine
Boot the machine with some form of LiveCD (FreeBSD, Knoppix, whatever)
At a command prompt type "dd if=/dev/source of=/dev/target", replacing source with the device that holds the source disk/card and target with the one you want to write to

ballerh3

g4u might work.
http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

cybrsrfr

I've done it with m0n0wall on a compact flash card. The same method is likely to work with pfSense since m0n0wall and pfSense have so much in common.

I used Windows with a USB to IDE adapter or USB drive enclosure. Made the image with rawdisk.exe (BSD/Linux equivalent is dd)
http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/~kiszka/RawDisk/

rawdisk [-r|-w] diskno imagefile
rawdisk -i diskno

-r read from disk
-w write to disk
-i print disk parameters only
diskno number of harddisk to read or write (0 for first disk)
imagefile name of the image file

–-------------------------------------------------
Create Image of drive 1 Example:

rawdisk.exe -r 1 example.img

Used physdiskwrite.exe to determine which disk number to use with rawdisk.
http://m0n0.ch/wall/physdiskwrite.php

For storage it is compressed with gzip using software 7zip.org.

Restore config using physdiskwrite Example:

physdiskwrite.exe example.img.gz

physdiskwrite v0.5.1 by Manuel Kasper mk@neon1.netSearching for physical drives...

Information for \.\PhysicalDrive0:
Windows: cyl: 12161
tpc: 255
spt: 63
C/H/S: 16383/16/63
Model: FUJITSU MHU2100AT
Serial number: NQ07T542AGMA
Firmware rev.: 00000008

Information for \.\PhysicalDrive1:
Windows: cyl: 62
tpc: 255
spt: 63

Information for \.\PhysicalDrive2:
DeviceIoControl() failed on \.\PhysicalDrive2.

Information for \.\PhysicalDrive3:
DeviceIoControl() failed on \.\PhysicalDrive3.

Information for \.\PhysicalDrive4:
DeviceIoControl() failed on \.\PhysicalDrive4.

Which disk do you want to write? (0..1) 1
About to overwrite the contents of disk 1 with new data. Proceed? (y/n) y
Found compressed image file
509967360/509967360 bytes written in total

Be careful using physdiskwrite you want to make sure to choose the right disk./mk@neon1.net

bgbearcatfan

acronis does work fine as well

josempinto

@ballerh3:

g4u might work.
http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

Thank you all the people who answered, for the tips, and for the help.

Not having time to test all, I stuck on g4u.

I have not so much tested, but for the first impression, it seams to be to slow, (slower than ghost) and does not resizes partitons. But works, and copied correctly the boot partition, grub loader and it’s settings (ghost fails doing this step).

Thanks.

josempinto

@bgbearcatfan:

acronis does work fine as well

Right!

This time, I had some spare time to use “acronis”, and have done the work fine as well.
Better user interface, still slow, about 1H30 to clone a 20G HD.

lordarcane

One thing that would be even better is if one was able to clone the Pfsense while it is running. Acronis has a client for linux. But, i dont know how to install it. Anyone that have done this? And successfully cloned the machine?

eyewittness

Use ghost 2003 boot cd works very nice! Is a lot faster then acronis! I had errors with acronis and ghost 2003 went very well!
If you don't have it i can supply you a boot image… for cd.

lordarcane

But, I guess that still requiers a reboot of the machine and some downtime for the firewall. I still would like a solution for cloning the machine while running. And, since Acronis does that for windows machines. I thought maybe that would work for PfSense/freebsd too.

How to clone PFSense?

–------------------------------------------------- Create Image of drive 1 Example:

Restore config using physdiskwrite Example:

–-------------------------------------------------
Create Image of drive 1 Example: