Install pfsense 2 on ALIX board

Corwin

Hello,

I have an ALIX board with a serial connection to my Debian box. I downloaded pfSense-Embedded-Update-2.0-ALPHA-ALPHA-20090115-1853.tgz but I have no clue what partition type to use. Does this even use GRUB for a bootloader?

I see there's a zfs folder under boot which is interesting.. I do have a Solaris box but to the best of my knowledge zfs is not [yet] bootable. I've heard that ZFS is optimized for flash devices.

I have spent a bit of time Googling through the forums but I have not found anything that seems like it currently applies. I'm guessing a lot has been improving. ;)

Thank you,
Michael Bushey

Corwin

I went from visiting the m0n0wall website to logging into the m0n0wall install on my ALIX board within 10 minutes. I downloaded pfSense-1.2.2-Embedded.img.gz but I was unable to get that image to work either.

Has pfSense outgrown the ALIX boards? Is it possible to get a dd image of a working ALIX image?

Sincerely,
Michael Bushey

Corwin

I booted Freedos and upgraded the firmware on my ALIX board to 0.99h. I also successfully booted iMedia and Voyage Linux.

dotdash

If you have been able to write a m0n0wall image to cf, you should be able to use the same procedure to write a pfSense image. Please detail your steps, as I have had no trouble with 1.2, 1.2.1, 1.2.2, and 2.0-Alpha-Alpha on various Alix 2c3's.

Corwin

$ md5sum pfSense-1.2.2-Embedded.img.gz
0026f01eec794932764546d534da8a34 pfSense-1.2.2-Embedded.img.gz

gunzip -c pfSense-1.2.2-Embedded.img.gz | dd of=/dev/sdb bs=16k

sfdisk –dump /dev/sdb

partition table of /dev/sdb

unit: sectors

/dev/sdb1 : start= 0, size= 0, Id= 0
/dev/sdb2 : start= 0, size= 0, Id= 0
/dev/sdb3 : start= 0, size= 0, Id= 0
/dev/sdb4 : start= 0, size= 50000, Id=a5, bootable
/dev/sdb5 : start= 0, size= 235032
/dev/sdb6 : start= 235032, size= 10240

Partitioning is corrupt... Partition type a5 is FreeBSD and bootable flag is correct. Unable to mount image.

Same method with the same CF card worked on iMedia Linux.

dotdash

I'm not familiar with all the options on various linuxi versions of gunzip, but you probably need to use -cd instead of -c to tell it to decompress the img before writing it.

Corwin

gunzip by default decompresses, gzip would require -dc.

Corwin

@dotdash:

I have had no trouble with 1.2, 1.2.1, 1.2.2, and 2.0-Alpha-Alpha on various Alix 2c3's.

Could you post a dd image for a working 2.0 pfSense on ALIX?