Packages in embedded
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Hi all pfSense users / developers!
I am working on a project for which I will be running pfSense on a Soekris net-5501 and I am wondering why package installation is totally unavailable when running the embedded version?
I understand that this is due to the fact that the majority of embedded devices uses CF cards and the majority of packages may require write access, but my point is that that isn't a fair assumption. I realize that the package manager files is included in the embedded version, but not available in the menu - however package installation dosn't seem possible (at least not on 1.2-RELEASE) due to the filesystem being mounted as read-only at /etc/inc/pkg-utils.inc line 373 (fopen function call). Inserting conf_mount_rw(); before this line solves the issue, but I really think that this should be corrected by the developers (who knows a whole lot better than me if this causes problems later on) and included in the embedded distrubution (I don't like doing this sort of hacks myself on production equipment)
Comments are very welcome!
Sincerely yours
Martin Kruse Jensen -
Since you seem to understand why packages are not officially supported on embedded installs:
Read up on the wiki, the dev-wiki and the packages subforum.
There are various guides how you can do a "fullinstall" on an embedded system.
http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Full_Install_on_WRAP_Embedded_Router -
I really don't want to do a full install - since I will be using a CF card and that wouldn't be clever, from a write-wear point of view. The idea is that a many packages don't need to write a whole lot - pftop, sipproxy and nmap would be examples… And I think that it would be fair to allow users to install such packages - perhaps with a big flashy warning message.
Maybe it would even be possible somehow to detect if the filesystem is a CF card, and skip the warning if it isn't.
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If you are prepared to deal with some of the possible side effects (which you are right might be limited), you can follow this guide from the docs:
http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Installing_packages_on_embedded
