Installing pfsense on a soekris net-5501?
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Given the nature of the case, you've got few other choices at this point. If it had a VGA console there are a lot of other choices.
I'd normally suggest you boot from something like a live CD/USB drive and then image it across the network either to a file share or through use of netcat (nc). What you'd need to do is build yourself a custom install that will boot the system without VGA or PS/2 being present, configure the LAN interface with DHCP and then start an SSH server on the LAN interface. Then you'd SSH in and image it.
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Unfortunately, a soekris can't boot from a USB device :( Supposedly clonezilla will work with serial console, so if I can get the pxe stuff to work I should be all set. I'm kind of annoyed at myself for not doing my homework more thoroughly before going the soekris route, but what's done is done. Thanks for the suggestions!
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Okay, here's the latest. Got clonezilla-live to netboot okay. For some reason, it took about 7 minutes for the netboot code running on the 5501 to actually ask for vmlinuz :( That said, it came up fine (I have clonezilla tftp fetch filesystem.squashfs for the root filesystem). It did come up fine, but that brought up the second problem: the BSD filesystem is not supported by clonezilla, so it would do the lowest common denominator approach, which is a dd sector by sector imaging of the filesystem, which is on a 29GB hard drive, which sucks. I guess I need to take a step back and rethink this.
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One thing that may help: apparently the partition image tool used by clonezilla recently had UFS support added, so when that make it into the next clonezilla ISO, I will be in much better shape :)
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If you can netboot you should be able to netboot a FreeBSD system. The FreeBSD handbook and mailing lists should be able to help with that bit (never tried it myself).
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I did actually get freebsd to boot on the 5501, but pardon me for being dense here - how will that help me do my backup? I need something that can do a bare-metal restore (clonezilla works just fine for that), so solutions that involve doing a tar or somesuch to a remote filesystem are not helpful. Checking the partclone (what clonezilla uses) site, there is UFS support, but it seems not built by default, so maybe I can get them to do that. I also noticed extremely slow netboot (upwards of 7 minutes to start loading vmlinuz) - googling shows I am not remotely the only person having this issue, and it doesn't seem unique to soekris - I've heard different things like setting enet speed and duplex manually, etc… I haven't had a chance to try this yet.
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Well, that is a bummer. I ran a packet sniffer while doing a netboot. There is a delay of almost exactly 7 minutes, during which I see an occasional '.' printed on the soekris console, but (key point here) NO network traffic. None. It's like it's trying to do something that isn't working and timing out. Again, I have seen references to this 7 minute or so delay elsewhere, but with no resolution. soekris website has a link to a mailing list, but the server there is down :( I may just have to give this up as a bad idea and e-bay the net-5501. Havoc, I do appreciate the suggestions, though (didn't want you to think I was not appreciative…)
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Well, good news. The syslinux on my rhel5 system was ancient. Got a much newer pxelinux and she comes right up. Now, I just need to get UFS support from partimage/partclone :)
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Watch that you may need UFS2 support, not just UFS support.
The advantage of booting FreeBSD is that you will be able to read the file system. Then you can do something like "find /root/file/system -depth -print | cpio -pdm /my/backup/location" to take a full image of the files (and permissions). To restore you'd just reverse the process "find /my/backup/location -depth -print | cpio -pdm /root/file/system".
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Yeah, you're right. I note the most recent partimage tool (used by clonezilla) has "UFS support" in the changelog, but looking at what the autoconfigure tool requires, it wants libufs2. I think I'll wait until they have this working, and in the meantime, back it up your way. Thanks!
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Hi
Could you describe your procedure to install pfsense with all packages to hard disk (on soekris net5501)
Thanks
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Well I can describe how I did it :)
I set up af TFTP server on a Debian machine and then booted the Soekris (5501) from that machines NIC. There are many guides on the net describing how to setup a TFTP server. Iam not sure this is the easiest way but it worked perfectly for me.
I guess the easiest thing is to mount the harddrive in another machine, install PfSense on it and then put it back in the Soekris.
