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    Restore corrupts system

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
    13 Posts 2 Posters 1.1k Views
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    • KOMK
      KOM
      last edited by

      Rarely. So what's the big deal about your interface assignments? Just redo them for the minute it will take.

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      • M
        markw
        last edited by

        I have no idea what else might be scrambled. Basically it shakes my confidence in the restore system.

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        • KOMK
          KOM
          last edited by

          Are you restoring on the same hardware?

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          • M
            markw
            last edited by

            No, I mentioned that. So I stopped restoring IP/interface stuff and only restored <cert>s and <ca>s by editing everything else out of the xml file. Didn't expect cert changes to cause a reboot much less scrambling of interfaces.

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            • KOMK
              KOM
              last edited by

              Sorry, I read a lot of questions and sometimes I forget some details as I'm bouncing between user's problems. And I doubt it was cert changes causing the issue. Probably a NIC mismatch issue.

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              • M
                markw @KOM
                last edited by

                My <cert> restore had no interface or ip information whatsoever in the xml file supplied.

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                • KOMK
                  KOM
                  last edited by

                  Why would it? Certificates don't care about IP addresses or interfaces.

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                  • M
                    markw
                    last edited by

                    That's my point. We're full circle now.

                    I restored from an xml file that had only <cert>s and <ca>s. The system rebooted itself and came up with no interface assignments. I don't know what else the restore may have broken so I reverted.

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                    • KOMK
                      KOM
                      last edited by

                      OK, I must be WAY too high or too tired to have missed all that detail. Sorry for wasting your time.

                      I would have tried the initial restore more than once just to rule out a glitch. Usually with mismatched NICs after a restore ther eis a timeout but then you can reassign everything. It shouldn't just hang forever. Also, doing a full restore with a hand-edited config that's missing virtually everything required is, um, unsupported 😀

                      You could have also figured out the driver type for your NIC and the just did a find & replace in your config. So, for example, if you have a Broadcom NIC before and now you're using Realtek, you could change your config and replace instances bge0 with re0, bge1 with re1 etc.

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                      • M
                        markw
                        last edited by

                        So I guess the long and short of it is that I can select subsets of stuff to restore using the webui, but can't safely remove sections from the xml file.

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                        • KOMK
                          KOM
                          last edited by

                          It's generally best not to hand-edit the config very much as it's really easy to make a mistake, and following unsupported methods can lead to unpredictable results.

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                          • M
                            markw
                            last edited by

                            I know, our software uses xml for backup and restore too. I'd probably say the same to our customers. I'm just a little surprised pfsense can't handle a well formed but partial xml for restore. Anyhow, thanks for the insights.

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