Motherboard swap questions
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G'day gents,
My research on this forum (and past experience with freenas) lead me to think I've got 80% of the answer to my questions, but just want to run it by you guys to make sure I'm not forgetting anything.
Found a pretty good deal on eBay for an x8sil-f with x3430, so scooped it up for the pfSense box. I'll be swapping internals soon from specs in sig.
Q1 : From what I understand, it should only be a matter of reassigning interfaces, right? As far as I know, pfSense won't care which sata port I plug my ssd in.
Q2 : if I decide to slap the nc360t in the new build, theoretically, I wouldn't even need to reassign interfaces, would I? I'd actually like to keep the option of having an extra two interfaces (either way) for future flexibility and tinkering, but should I use the board's built-in two or my expansion card's?
Or does it matter?
Cheers!
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When I can clone a machine with VMware ie most pc's of sorts (not tried things like RPi's, Soekris and other essentially non pc type devices), where I have pfsense running on it, backing up the XML and the modifying the XML so the interfaces match either the destination baremetal or virtual pc generally works ok provided the interfaces match up.
Where interfaces match up, then no you dont have to even edit the xml backup to modify the interfaces.
The XML backup & restore is a nice flexible way of moving setups between devices.
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I'll make a backup of the config, but I was hoping not to reinstall from scratch. I'll try it without reinstall first and update this thread when I'm complete.
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Generally you can just move the drive over, re-assign the NICs, and you'll be set. Only time where that wouldn't be the case is if the disk changes identifiers. That's described on this page along with how to work around it, if you end up with a mountroot failure after moving the drive over:
https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/PfSense_on_Watchguard_Firebox#Booting_from_HD -
Thanks much! And just to confirm, reassigning interfaces is a matter of hitting option 1 on the console once boot is complete? (Option 1or 2, can't quite remember which at the moment…)
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If they're mismatched, it'll take you straight to the interface assignment prompt during boot.
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Wish I could update this, but my upgrade ground to a halt yesterday. Scythe (makers of my Big Shuriken cooler) were kind enough to send LGA1156 mounting brackets for it, since I didn't have them anymore. But, for some weird reason, my cooler didn't have the required screw holes (EDIT : Further research, now that I know, indicates I have an even older version of the cooler than I thought, with push-in clips…)
Anyway, of course, I had to find that out when I had it in my hands, the computer fully disassembled...lol.
So, things are re-assembled for now on the old hardware. I've contacted Scythe, we'll see what happens.
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OK - so Scythe sent me another set of brackets, install is now complete and working fine. So, for anybody wanting to do a motherboard swap, I can confirm that, in my case at least, everything went just fine. I did end up keeping my NC360T card and hooking up my WAN/LAN wires to the exact same ports (keeping the motherboard's NICs for future expansion or what not), but pfSense just fired up as if nothing had happened.
Two questions, though :
1. I used to see the CPU temp in the dashboard, with my AMD CPU. I don't anymore with the X3430. Is there a reason for this? Can I restore it?
2. Is there such a thing as ipmitool in pfsense? My searches seem to indicate there is, but a simple command to reset the IPMI password, which worked fine on FreeNAS (ipmitool -I open user set password 2 ADMIN, to reset to the default "ADMIN" for example) didn't work in pfSense - device not found or some such. I didn't try modifying fan parameters with ipmitool, just figured I'd ask you guys first.Totally unrelated : anybody else seeing arpwatch as a red "X" on the dashboard ever since update to 2.2.3?
Cheers!