Notably failing installer and thoughts about the whole process
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Yesterday i had to do a new install due to the crash of pfsense. (shit happens ;-)
So what happened with the new install was the same than happenes every time since last summer with all pf 2 installs:
First of it all i have partitioned the whole disk in several parts. When i install newly it would be great to retain the "old" slices which do not have anything to do with the pf install. But i can do what i want, pf wants to format the whole disk and create new slices even when i do not want to do. Is there any reason to force that? I have a small slice for pfsense and a big one for extra things ( a running sftp with drivers, installs and so on). It would be a really great thing if i could select the slices i want to retain.
Second and biggest fail is the installation with a geom-mirror, which fails greatfully: I get messages (added as photos), but at last pf installs and starts as expected. But i think the whole install is somewhat strange due to that things and at last its the biggest showstopper pf has. :-(
So one thing i would find extremly great is a change of the "formatting and partition all" to a "format if neccessary and partition what you want". That would free resources when a new install is inevitable. Many thanks!
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Try using the web-based experimental installer by visiting <your gui="" ip="">/installer/</your>
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sorry for being somewhat silly: start from CD, point from other PC via browser to that install and there it is?
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yeah, boot from the CD and it should be a running default firewall then - (or you can run with your config on a USB stick - search the doc wiki for "pfi") - fire up a browser on a locally connected PC and go to that URL.
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I'll try that. Sounds great! Thanks a lot for your quick answer!!! :-)
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Sorry for molesting again, but that experimental installer is useless in my previous mentioned config: it doesnt show up my geom mirror. So are there any plans to change that? In conclusion seems to be better not to use a geom mirror if in case of a new install someone wants to retain data on separate slices…
Is thee any way for me to install without any formatting the whole disk and use my setup? If i have to hack that via console, doesnt matter, i only dont want to loose all data on this extra slices. Would be ok if the root has to be formatted, but not home or other slices.
Thanks again for all your efforts.