PfSense on CF card. SOLVED

feadin

What hardware are you using?
I had the same problem with my ALIX2c3 and a 1GB Kingston CF. The only way to get it to boot was to disconnect the serial cable from the ALIX, turn it on, wait a few minutes and then connect the serial cable again and configure the interfaces. In my case the booting problem was only when the serial cable was phisically connected to the hardware.
Now I can configure it using the web interface and it seems to be working fine. My guess is something related to the Kingston CF, but I didn't have the time yet to try another CF brand.

jamengual

I'm using a Acrosser motherboard, Intel Pentium D 1.8, that's work perfecty with linux embbeded and was working yesterday perfectly with pfsense.

I'm using a bounch of CF cards.

128, 512, 1g, 2g mainly Kingstom and A-Data.

I'm using 512 images and standard images of pfsense, two different Car readers, two different programs to dump the image ( dd an phydisk….) and is still not working.

I think that there is a devil inside of the motherboard.... ;D

jamengual

Update.

I try what you told me, the serial cable disconnected and now after waiting 3 minutes and connecting back the cable I can see this :

*** Welcome tob pfSense 2.0-ALPfHA-ALPHA-embeddeed on pfSense ***0
: link state changed to UP
bfe1: link state changed to DOWN
bge0: link state changed to DOWN
bge1: link state changed to UP

pfSense console setup

Setting up embedded specific environment…� done.

___Enter full pathname of shell or RETURN for /bin/sh:

*** Welcome to pfSense 2.0-ALPHA-ALPHA-embedded on pfSense ***

Before I never saw the interfaces comming up and the welcome message.

What king of bug or configuration can make the console affect the booting process of pfsense ?

Thanks.

jamengual

Hi guys, is me again…..

Well finally I got pfSense working in the same appliance but with a hard drive no CF card.

I install it with the cd and a PCI Video card and no problems.

And just a minute ago I realize that when I connect the serial port and reboot the machine the pfSense doesn't boot up and stays in single user mode, but if I remove the serial cable and reboot again, everything works fine.

Why is that ?

How can enable vga support in the boot options ?

Thanks.

jamengual

Finally I figure out the problem.

is the freaking serial usb adapter.

I'm using this "PL2303 Mac OS X driver v1.2.1r2, Prolific Edition" is a usb-serial adapter and using "screen /dev/usbserial 9600" to connect the serial in the terminal.

I have another computer with a native serial port and I connected the port directly without the usb-serial adapter and booting with Freesbie and using screen and is working perfectly and now is giving me the option to chose the interfaces and everything.

Can someone explain me why ?

Thanks.

PS : it wasn't the CF card or the image size or the CF reader or the motherboard or the bios or the acpi or the dma, just the #@$$%@#$%@ usb-serial adapter.

GruensFroeschli

serial to usb adaptors are a chapter for themself.

I found that this adaptor:
https://www.distrelec.ch/ishopWebFront/catalog/product.do/para/node/is/DD-1780/and/highlightNode/is//and/id/is/02/and/series/is/1.html

has less problems than others.

(But if you happen to have an application where the developer tries to transmit data with the handshake-lines it's still not fast enough ::) )

feadin

Great! I'm glad you finally find out the source of the problem.
I have the same Prolific serial-usb adapter so there's the reason I got the same error :)

bill_mcgonigle

I'm seeing the same error message, and while I do have an OSX USB Serial adapter, the same error occurs with it disconnected as well, cold booted. I'm seeing this with the 1.2.1 embedded image, on several USB sticks on two different hardware devices that have always worked easily before. It seems like some of my USB sticks are working better than the others. Not sure if this is FreeBSD 7 related or not, I haven't tried a 6-based release yet.

Delex

This problem may lay a bit deeper, I'm using a Soekris net4801 box, flashed the CF with the new version and still had problems booting with the serial cable connected (a real one; not usb! just 2 sub-d 9pin connectors) between the Soekris and an old XP notebook.

Initially it looked OK but it seemed the boot stopped before reaching the pfsense part. To get pfsense to run I just disconnected the serial plugged the power and waited a 2 minutes as suggested above. Then plugged in the serial and was just in time to see the last part of the pfsense initialization and the menu coming up, from there changing the LAN address and restoring the configuration went as normal.

For comparison I also fired up a Soekris net5501, copied the image again to CF and started up. This one boots just fine, with the serial cable connected.

bill_mcgonigle

@Delex:

Initially it looked OK but it seemed the boot stopped before reaching the pfsense part.

Did you get the bootloader on the failed boot? That is to say, "it's not a hardware problem?"

I think I saw the FreeBSD 7.1 release notes had something about improved bootloading on USB flash - not sure if that'd be relevant here or not.

Delex

Yes, I reached the bootloader and was even able to use the menu option to reboot. But that's how far it went no pfsense unless the serial cable was not connected during the first 2/3 minutes, and also only on the 4801 box the 5501 had no problem at all.