What version on a 4gb compactflash card, i also want monitor access

Guest

from what i understand the 1g,2g,4g only have serial access, are there any (embedded) version i can run that will give me monitor access?

/Fredde

pfsense_fan009

@fredde:

from what i understand the 1g,2g,4g only have serial access, are there any (embedded) version i can run that will give me monitor access?

/Fredde

no! Use fullinstall for an install on compact flash (I did it in the past, may give some problems after a period of time).
Now I'm using an alix.

jimp

None of the official embedded builds have VGA support, but there is support in the builder for making such images.

Some of the process is covered here, but it doesn't mention specifically how to do that. You'd have to look at the builder scripts and see how it is done.

joebarnhart

I've been runing a compact flash "microdrive" (tiny disk drive) for a couple of hears using the "live CD" version of pfSense. I tried a flash drive first but it failed after about 3 months.

The Hitachi microdrives work best – do NOT get a Seagate because it won't boot under FreeBSD 7.x. They are all over ebay at good prices. I just bought some "pulls" from mp3 players for a song (get it?).

One note -- my box wouldn't support DMA on the compact flash slot so I had to add the following line to the boot config:


set hw.ata.ata_dma="0"

cheesyboofs

All true - Stick with the Hitachi's

This is what I had to do to get my microdrives working and this is what you may need to do,

Boot the 1.2.x install CD
Set LAN IP
Do a fresh full install (99) to your microdrive as if it were a real hard drive.
REBOOT (remove CD)

(Microdrives don't like running at anything above PIO4 so in your PC BIOS Disable UDMA for IDE devices)
If you don't do this you may not even be able to boot or you will get the spinnig cursor but it will spin REALLY slowly.

Hit the space-bar when the kernel is loading (not at the Default F1 prompt) a little after, you should get an OK prompt.
Then type;

OK set hw.ata.ata_dma=0
OK boot

It should then boot all the way up to the pfsense menu.

Drop to the shell by pressing 8

Now edit /boot/loader.conf using vi;

vi /boot/loader.conf

Press the 'i' key and then move the cursor to the end of the last line and hit the enter key,
add the line;
hw.ata.ata_dma=0

so it looks like;

autoboot_delay="1"
kern.ipc.nmbclusters="0"
hw.ata.ata_dma=0

then press Esc flowed by :wq

Then press 'Ctrl D' to get back to the menu. Now you can restore your config by going to the web interface and quitting the wizard by clicking on the pfSense logo a couple of times.

And the following reboot should boot fine without any kernel flags as you have already set them. If you restore your config before you have edited /boot/loader.conf you for some reason, on the subsequent reboots, can't input kernel flags and your install will be dead as you are now stuck in some weird catch 22.

If you wish to update in the future your modified loader.conf will be overwritten, to fix this…

touch /tmp/no_upgrade_reboot_required

Run a firmware update as you normally would, but it won't reboot at the end.

Go back to a shell and then redo your loader.conf changes, and reboot.