Locks up on booting (was Restoring part of my config to a new system)
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Hi all,
I have a pfsense PC (pfsense1 on 2.3.3-release p1) with 5 ethernet ports, 3 DSL connections, dozens of rules, hundreds of aliases, a few VPNs and a few packages. It would take days of work to recreate from scratch. I have a hardware issue on the ethernet card on on this PC and have a spare nearly identical PC ready to swap in. So I backup the config, load a new PC (pfsense2 on 2.4.2) and restore the config.However it has different NICs and no matter how I try to restore the configuration from pfsense1 to pfsense2, it just won't connect to the WAN after the restore, and I have to factory reset pfsense2.
Is there a way I can partially backup bits of pfsense1 (namely NAT, firewall rules, Aliases) then I can recreate the Users, certs, gateways etc myself and restore those entries?
To answer the obvious question of "why not just fix the nic?" well I want to be able to do this in future when the "live" pfsense is completely fried and get the spare working with very little downtime, then fix the broken box at my leisure.
thanks for any suggstions
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Is there a way I can partially backup bits of pfsense1 (namely NAT, firewall rules, Aliases) then I can recreate the Users, certs, gateways etc myself and restore those entries?
Yes. Go to Diagnostics - Backup/Restore. Under Backup Configuration, select the Backup area picklist and change it from All to whatever section you need.
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Seems so obvious now! Thanks… do you know if I will have any problems with particular areas restoring between 2.3 and 2.4?
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OK this just got worse. I backed up just the aliases from the original box and restored.
All worked OK, showed fine, then I rebooted. It gets stuck after Starting CRON….done.I wiped, reloaded and did the same again and it got stuck again - pic attached. So pretty stuck now. Any help welcomed, thanks.
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It's getting stuck at what comes after cron, and I don't know what that is.
If I were you, I would try doing a full backup and then editing the file to replace any instances of your old NIC type with the new ones. For example, if your old NICs were Intel em and now you have Realtek re, do a find/replace on em0 -> re0, em1 -> re1 etc. then restore from that file. If the NIC order is weird then you may have to reassign the NICs from the console using the menu.
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I am kind of getting further.
I tried once more but rebooting with both LAN and WAN disconnected ie. yanked the cables out.
It seemed to boot properly.. just trying to restore each bit in turn now and seeing how it goes…..
