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    PFSense USB Installation VK-T40E

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Problems Installing or Upgrading pfSense Software
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    • J
      jailbreaker
      last edited by

      Hi Team,

      I recently upgraded by PFsense to the latest release 2.2.2 from 2.2.1 and i started having issues where i couldn't ssh to the box.  Using the diag command line tool i sent "cat /etc/passwd" to query it and it displayed log output and script data back to me.  I then went through other configuration files i new of and they were all looking corrupt so i created a bootable USB stick using the pfSense-memstick-2.2.2-RELEASE-i386.img.  I formated the hard drive and installed a fresh instance of PFsense.

      Now when i boot the VK-T40E it displays "PC Engines APU BIOS build date: Apr  5 2014" as the last line and does not boot pfsense.

      My support has lapsed so i really need some help trying to get this thing working again.  I have tried to roll back to 2.2.1 to no avail which means im doing something wrong clearly.  I do know that i can boot the usb copy but that is it.

      Thanks

      Jail

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      • C
        cmb
        last edited by

        At the end of the installation, did you choose the embedded kernel option?

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        • J
          jailbreaker
          last edited by

          Yes i did select the Embedded Kernel Option :(

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          • J
            jailbreaker
            last edited by

            So i did the install as you normally would then instead of rebooting i returned to the terminal.

            From the terminal i mounted the disk where the new operating system was and add the following to the /boot/loader.conf.local file located in my mount directory

            mount -t ufs /dev/ada### /root/ada###
            vi  /root/ada###/boot/loader.conf.local

            deleted kern.cam.boot_delay="10000"

            added the next 3 lines
            hw.ata.atapi_dma="1"
            hw.ata.ata_dma="1"
            hw.ata.wc="1"

            Then i umounted and rebooted the box cleanly and booted of the 30g mSata disk where i had just installed. Up came the operating system and everything was fine and dandy until i needed to remove the usb stick.

            So i pulled the power on the VK-T40E (dirty shutdown) removed the usb device and then plugged it back in.  Everything appeared to be working fine until it finished booting.  It prompted me for a password then a username and password and none of the defaults worked so i rebooted with my usb stick again, mounted the disk as i had done before and discovered some configuration files in the ETC directory were corrupted.

            So it appears i have hit the https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/4523 bug which will require me to wait until 2.2.3.  I had seen this issue on 2.2.0 upgrades etc when things such as the wheel group disappeared from the /etc/group directory.  As i have an embedded device i need to ssh to the device and shut it down cleanly or suffer corruption everytime. so beware people :-)

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            • D
              doktornotor Banned
              last edited by

              @jailbreaker:

              added the next 3 lines
              hw.ata.atapi_dma="1"
              hw.ata.ata_dma="1"
              hw.ata.wc="1"

              This has no effect on 2.2.x, read the wiki for proper hints.

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