Auto config backup with vmware templates (2.4.4)

Gisle

Hi

We are using pfSense in our virtual environment and we like to deploy from a template.
We also want to take advantage of the auto config backup in pfsense 2.4.4 but when we deploy from a template the new VM has the same device key as the template.

Is there a way to generate a new device key, so we can setup a new VM from template with a unique config backup?

jimp

The key is a hash of the sshd host key, so you could copy that from the old box to the new box and it should take on the same key as the previous. It's also possible to pass an alternate key to the ACB package to pick up a config from another box.

Gisle

Hi Jim

Thank you for your reply.
I think you misunderstood my question. We want to generate a new device key for the VM deployed from a template. We are deploying a pfSense VM for every new customer (multi tentant hosting), so we need to have a unique config backup from each VM deployed from the template.

Is it possible to generate a new sshd host key and a device key for ACB without doing a new install for every VM?

jimp

You could use ssh-keygen on any platform with openssh to generate the keys first, then check the hash, then copy those to the target VM maybe. You'll need to look through the ACB code and the code that generates the ssh keys to figure out how to replicate the process.

thyagofs

@Gisle Hi!

I have the same problem. Same scenario as yours. Did you solve it in any way?

Tks!

Gisle

@thyagofs Hello
We didn't implement "auto config backup". Instead we continued to use this tool https://github.com/KoenZomers/pfSenseBackup and have one script with all our pfsense boxes and we also run VM backup.
The other options is to run the installer each time you need a new pfsense.

thyagofs

@Gisle thanks for your reply.
Cheers!