Netgate APU: Transition to Full, or Rebuild from Scratch?
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I have a netgate APU that is several years old (the old AMD G-T40E processor model), and I can't update it anymore because NanoBSD is no longer supported.
I have two options available to me.
Option 1: Try and convert the NanoBSD setup to a full standard install. I can't seem to find 100% clear-cut confirmed-working instructions for this though.
Option 2: Tear down the network and rebuild the pfSense box within a virtual environment. This'll take time. Doable, but it just takes time.
I'm not a fan of either option, but I thought I'd inquire here as to what would be best - convert the APU device's install to 'full', or just redo from scratch.
Thoughts?
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Don't understand why you have to "tear down the network" to swap another pFsense box in there. There maybe something else you are planing beyond just upgrading the firewall you are leaving out.
Not familiar with the G-T40E but if that was specifically designed for nanoBSD, telling me low performance platform, I think time to move on.
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Just put a small msata in it, do a full install, and restore the config.
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Don't understand why you have to "tear down the network" to swap another pFsense box in there. There maybe something else you are planing beyond just upgrading the firewall you are leaving out.
Not familiar with the G-T40E but if that was specifically designed for nanoBSD, telling me low performance platform, I think time to move on.
By "tear down" I mean that there will be a total outage of networking while I rewrite the route configs on switches, rewire the network, set up trunks on ESXi so that things work properly, etc.
Given that this is an 'older' platform, I had a feeling it might have been time to put a better Sense system into play, whether it's virtualized or not.
I'll work on the 'virtualization' route then, which will give me far more resources (CPU, RAM, etc.) to play with. I just don't like dumping all my Internet right through my ESXi environment, but I guess I have no choice.
(I plan to get a new pfSense appliance in the next year or so, so this is more or less a 'temporary' inconvenience…)
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Just going to put this out there:
My network needed to be majorly redone in order to reduce complexity. That is, remove VLANs, make configurations more 'sane', and condense networking down to one switch and many VLANs.
Five hours later of beating my head on Cisco switch configs and Ubiquity wifi controllers and access points to get everything talking around the network properly, it works. I'm now fully on a virtualized pfSense appliance. I might fiddle around with upgrading the APU in-place, but that's a long time in the future. My network now operates with the newly-configured pfSense VM.
Thanks for your advice to point at the "redo it with a VM" solution, it actually is responding faster now than it did before. (AND the VLAN trunks all work without issue! :D)