Unable to complete pfsense configurartion/installation on a Linux guest KVM

[Arun Khan]

I am trying to install pfsense as a Linux KVM guest VM so that I can  evaluate it before deploying it on a real hardware.

I have configured the guest VM  with two NICs (rtl8139 for the WAN and e1000 for the LAN) as well as a 2G qemu hard disk image file, memory
is 512MB.

I boot up the guest VM with the pfsense installer ISO file - No problems.

I choose the default and then choose the "I" option to install onto to the qemu hard disk image file - again no problems.  The installation goes fine.

Upon reboot pfsense displays the 2 NICs as re0 and em0 respectively and asks me if I want to configure VLANs  - I answer no.

Then I choose WAN as re0 and LAN as em0.

After which I answer 'y' to "Do you want to proceed with configuration?"

pfsense proceeds with a few configuration and then hangs on "Configuring WAN interface …"

I have tried the official release ISO (1.2.3) as well as the latest snapshot ISO (2.0-BETA3-20100630-1444).

In the official release the configurator hangs "Configuring LAN interface ..."

Google search threw up a few links where people said to wait for DHCP timeout.  For both ISO I have waited more than 20 mins.

Any pointers on how to cross this barrier to complete the pfsense configuration would be much appreciated.

Thanks.
-- Arun Khan

[Pootle]

I have installed 1.2 under KVM on Ubuntu and am still running it quite happily.  Are your virtual NICs hooked up to bridges on the linux host OK?

I certainly didn't have any particular problems installing.

Performance of course isn't to good with no virtio support in freeBSD (and consequently high CPU usage).

Was just thinking I might try out V2 beta, I'll report back in a couple of days if I get the time.

[Arun Khan]

@Pootle:

I have installed 1.2 under KVM on Ubuntu and am still running it quite happily.  Are your virtual NICs hooked up to bridges on the linux host OK?

Yes, I have a standard shell script to invoke the VMs.  Here is the script for my pfsense VM.

#!/bin/bash

export KVM_DIR=$HOME/KVM

generate an unique MAC address for each NIC

nic0=00:07:43:2c:b8:01
nic1=00:07:43:0d:c5:04

qemu-kvm
-vga cirrus
-m 512
-drive file=${KVM_DIR}/vdisks/pfsense.vdd,index=0,boot=on
-net nic,model=rtl8139,macaddr=${nic0}
-net tap,ifname=tap2,script=no,downscript=no
-net nic,model=e1000,macaddr=${nic1}
-net tap,ifname=tap5,script=no,downscript=no
-daemonize \

devices "tap2" and "tap5" are bound to bridges "br0" and "br1" respectively in the host OS (openSUSE 11.2).  I am using the above strategy to evaluate ClearOS, ebox, Untangle etc.  and they boot up fine with the 2 NICs.  Needless to say, I boot the VMs only one at any given time and not all at the same time.

Please see attached screenshot where the LAN/WAN configuration go into never land.