Netgate Discussion Forum
    • Categories
    • Recent
    • Tags
    • Popular
    • Users
    • Search
    • Register
    • Login

    Persisting pfSense nanobsd /tmp and /var across reboots

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
    2 Posts 1 Posters 823 Views
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as topic
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with topic management privileges can see it.
    • T
      torsionbar28
      last edited by

      I'm a new pfSense user, I just got 2.2.6 running on a PC Engines APU1d2 board.  The board has an 8 GB SD card with the embedded nanobsd pfSense image on it.  The board also has a 60 GB mSATA SSD installed.

      These APU boards have enough RAM for a healthy sized /var filesystem running from RAM.  It would be nice to be able to persist this across reboots by syncing to/from the SSD during shutdown and bootup.

      Is there an easy way to do this?  To have pfSense copy the contents of /var and /tmp to the SSD (currently mounted as /ssd) during shutdown, and then during bootup, copy them back from the SSD to the /var and /tmp ramdisks during startup?

      My thinking is that using the embedded nanobsd image (vs. doing a full install to the SSD) keeps /tmp and /var in RAM, so it doesn't cause excessive wear on the SSD.  Syncing to/from the SSD at boot and shutdown time would be minimal wear since one doesn't normally reboot that often, and it should be a very fast operation (RAM to SSD and vice versa), and then I gain the benefit of persisting that data across shutdowns and reboots.

      Thank you

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • T
        torsionbar28
        last edited by

        Guess I'm the only one interested in this functionality.  :-\

        I went ahead and ordered a new more durable mSATA drive, so that I can run a full install of pfSense on it.  It's an industrial mSATA drive that uses SLC, good for 8 years @ 100 GB per day of writes.  I won't have to worry about it wearing out any time soon!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • First post
          Last post
        Copyright 2025 Rubicon Communications LLC (Netgate). All rights reserved.