Installing pfSense 2.0 on a Dell PowerEdge R210

hikeonpast

I have the same issue on an R310 (installation stalling at 38% complete), BIOS 1.5.3 with an Intel X25-V SATA SSD trying to install 2.0 BETA5-amd64-20110216-1710.

Setting processor Virtualization Technology did not work for me.

Using a 2GB primary partition instead of the whole 40GB disk got me from stalling at 38% (/usr/local/bin/cpdup -vvv -I -o /usr /mnt/usr) to stalling at 45% (/usr/local/bin/cpdup -vvv -I -o /usr /mnt/usr) complete.

Using a regular 250GB SATA drive yields the same results–I can get to 45% if I use a 2GB partition.

Any other suggestions?

hikeonpast

I was able to get the installation to complete by setting:

Turbo Mode = OFF
C-states = OFF
Virtualization Tech = ON

BUT…when I went to repeat the install on a second, identical machine, it did not complete. :-\

I was unable to find a configuration that would allow installation to complete, but cloning the first disk seems to have worked. I still don't understand why processor settings would impact the installation process, but they definitely seem to have an effect.

poscom

power edge R210
how not detect ide or scsi ?, pf 2.0 Feb 8 installed
what bios setting on ?

thks

poscom

@Aziz:

Tried with a dfferent hard drive and it worked! (even though first hard drive was brand new)

please help me

i cant detect ide or scsi ?, pf 2.0 Feb 8 installed
what bios setting on ?
i change HD seagate 80GB SATA

thks for all

heper

A "solution" to get passed hardware issues is to virtualize it using VMware ESXi (it's free)

I have a 2.0 Beta snapshot running on a Dell R310 with SAS 6IR controller with 2x SATA in raid1 using ESXi …. it works beautifully

Be sure to turn on virtualization stuff in bios as noted in previous posts

i never tried to install pfsense bare-metal .... A xeon quadcore is wasted when it has to run idle all the time ;)

Alexios

Hallo,

i had the same problem

PC HP DC7800 and my installation with Pfsense 2.0 RC1 stopped everytime at
38% in step /usr/local/bin/cpdup -vvv -l -o /usr/mnt/usr -too.

I had installed earlier on the same PC Pfsense 1.23 and it worked.
First I checked the Bios settings, second different installation settings - no solution.

But then i remembered that the only difference on my PC between Pfsense 2.0 RC1 and my Pfsense 1.23 installation was my Keyboard.

It sounds suspicious but with my Fujitsu-Siemens Keyboard PX PS2 my installation stopped everytime at 38% in step /usr/local/bin/cpdup -vvv -l -o /usr/mnt/usr .

With my Cherry Keyboard G83-6744 USB the installation with Pfsense 2.0 RC1 works fine now.

Someone made the same experience?

jeebsion

Just to share my experience with the machine recently after countless of tries ..

Instead of installing directly on the R210 machine, I did the installation on a desktop PC attached to the server's HDD (took the HDD of the R210 then connect it to the desktop PC). Then move the HDD back into R210. Everything went well after that :-)

poscom

@jeebsion:

Just to share my experience with the machine recently after countless of tries ..

Instead of installing directly on the R210 machine, I did the installation on a desktop PC attached to the server's HDD (took the HDD of the R210 then connect it to the desktop PC). Then move the HDD back into R210. Everything went well after that :-)

ohhh ya… nice info, thks all :)))

bpf

Hello everybody, first post here…

FYI: I just installed a R210 with an Intel PCI add-on card having 4 ports (Intel Gigabit ET appearing as igb0..3) so the complete system has 6 Ethernet ports. To pass the 38% mark when the install process shows '/usr/local/bin/cpdup -vvv -l -o /usr/mnt/usr', I had to disable all multi core features (virtualization and all).

I kept this setup even after the install otherwise pfsense would freeze when booting (showing 'starting DHCP' while DHCP is not used) and even after installing the SMP kernel option at the end of the install process.

Once the system worked, I did not try to restore the CPU features in the BIOS since one does not break something that works :-\

Currently I use pfsense to bridge 5 interfaces together to shape the WAN traffic and the system is stable using not much CPU (another reason why I did not made new tries with the BIOS features).

Installing pfsense was fine once the BIOS features problem was understood (thanks to this topic), while first trying to use zeroshell lead nowhere: no easy install procedure, no operationnal NIC driver for the R210 (embedded ports or igb ports), I guess the kernel of ZS has no recent driver/modules for those NICs.

I never used pfsense before and found the web configurator to be rather intuitive. However I did not find a way yet to use traffic shaping on custom ports (we have specific applications using port numbers not officially defined at IANA). I made the traffic shaping setup using the 'dedicated links' wizard.

I setup the SNMP server (for MRTG) and the 'bridge0' interface does not show any activity while per interface traffic is available: being able to see the complete bridge activity would be nice.

All in all I'm happy with pfsense, thanks for the good work !

m4rcu5

Another R210 user here.

I noticed the hanging at 38% also. Strange thing: this was with the 64bit Beta5, the 32bit worked.

-m4rcu5

toomeek

I have running Ubuntu Server on Dell PowerEdge R310 (which is NOT gateway) and pfSense is installed on KVM-Qemu (BACKUP gateway), this is great becouse I can do volume snapshots or just copy VM hdd image without any problem with VM recovery and host-os is isolated from WAN. I did not experienced any network performance issue, yet. Also, no problem with installation.

Most important is to have to use BRIDGE networking in HOST OS:
cat /etc/network/interfaces

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# Bridge: network card connected to the core switch
auto br0
iface br0 inet static
	address 192.168.0.1
	netmask 255.255.255.0
	gateway 192.168.0.254
        bridge_ports eth0
        bridge_stp off
        bridge_fd 0
        bridge_maxwait 0
        #metric 1

#bridge: network card connected to switch with 2 DSL modems
auto br1
iface br1 inet manual
	bridge_ports eth1
	pre-up ifconfig eth1 up
        bridge_stp off
        bridge_fd 0
        bridge_maxwait 0
        #metric 1

cat /etc/libvirt/qemu/pfSense.xml

 <domain type="kvm"><name>pfSense</name>
  <uuid>6b279064-5f3e-aa45-1e78-1615e9759419</uuid>
  <memory>1048576</memory>
  <currentmemory>524288</currentmemory>
  <vcpu>2</vcpu>
   <os><type arch="i686" machine="pc-0.12">hvm</type></os>
   <features><acpi><apic><pae></pae></apic></acpi></features>
   <clock offset="utc"><on_poweroff>destroy</on_poweroff>
  <on_reboot>restart</on_reboot>
  <on_crash>restart</on_crash>
   <devices><emulator>/usr/bin/kvm</emulator>
     <disk type="file" device="cdrom"><driver name="qemu" type="raw"><target dev="hdc" bus="ide"><readonly></readonly></target></driver></disk>
     <disk type="file" device="disk"><driver name="qemu" type="raw"><source file="/var/lib/libvirt/images/pfSense.img">
       <target dev="sda" bus="scsi"></target></driver></disk>
     <interface type="bridge"><mac address="52:54:00:1b:2c:4f"><source bridge="br1"></mac></interface>
     <interface type="bridge"><mac address="52:54:00:22:1a:c4"><source bridge="br1"></mac></interface>
     <interface type="bridge"><mac address="52:54:00:21:2c:4d"><source bridge="br0"></mac></interface>
     <console type="pty"><target port="0"></target></console>
     <console type="pty"><target port="0"></target></console>

     <graphics type="vnc" port="-1" autoport="yes"></graphics></devices></clock></domain>

Guest

On a machine I built from spare parts, I had the same issue. 32bit worked, 64bit did not, but that was almost a month ago now. I plan to try 64bit once 2.0 is stable.

@m4rcu5:

Another R210 user here.

I noticed the hanging at 38% also. Strange thing: this was with the 64bit Beta5, the 32bit worked.

-m4rcu5

scheidell

same here, dell 850 and 860. you might be right about the usb.. I see it waiting to mount usb… with no usb kb.
but my workaround was to wipe out the first 512 bytes of the boot drive and it worked find.

some strange conflict between usb drivers and kb and hd?

ennay

I've only just now completed the installation, so unsure of how stable this will turn out to be, but I'm anxious to share a possible workaround – when stuck at 38%, try disconnecting, then reconnecting your keyboard. I did this on a Dell R210 and installation finished right up after that. This is the 64-bit version. The install was run with virtualization disabled, single-core, c-states off, but I would be it would help in any configuration.

sot010174

I had the same issue on a dell server and if I removed the ethernet cables, pfsense would install no problem.

tacfit

We had no problems installing on our R210, though I don't recall what snapshot we started with.

dmcushing

I installed on two R210s using the following method:

1. Boot, enter BIOS setup, disable NICs
2. Boot, install pfSense
3. When it reboots, enter BIOS setup and re-enable NICs

For whatever reason, something at the 38% mark is getting killed by NIC detection on the R210s. I haven't had a problem with the boxes after installing this way.

p0ddie

I second the keyboard experience here. I tried seeting up pfsense 2.0 a while ago on completely different hardware, but the installation would freeze at some point (could very well be at 38%). I had a Logitech wireless usb keyboard connected. Using a Cherry PS/2 keyboard everything worked flawlessly. Did also work with an OEM HP keyboard from a DC5800 I still had laying around.

So, you might wanna check the keyboard thing first. Make sure it is a PS/2 keyboard and that it is plugged in before POST.

eri--

For Dell R210 i know for sure that it is the shared interrupt of the disk controllers that makes it go crazy during install.
It works fine with the amd64 version of pfSense with others you will have issues.

Gob

There are still further issues with the DELL R210 once you get past the installation problems.
The onboard NICs don't work very well with the bce driver. I had ports detected at 10 baseT HD.
VoIP struggled on that box also with very poor call quality. Don't know if its the combination of the NICs and the i3 CPU that cause the problems. Swapped it out for a DELL PE1850 yesterday and it works perfectly with RC3. All my VoIP problems have gone away.