Possible to transfer config from VM to Netgate appliance?

McDing · Apr 2, 2020, 9:11 PM

Greetings :)

I have an SG-4860 Netgate appliance.

I am planning a complete reorg of my network and VLANs. I thought the 2.4.5 release would be a good opportunity to perform a fresh install of my 4860 (as in reset and start new). While everything is currently working fine, I have tinkered with it over the years and probably have activated some settings at some point I shouldn't have. So I'd rather start fresh...

Because it takes some time to reinstall and configure everything, I was wondering whether I could do my fresh install in a VM, get all my DHCP assignments, VLANs, Radius and all configured and tested, then export the config to reimport it into my appliance.

I assume it is not possible due to the fact that (among other things) the interface assignments wouldn't match and all, but, just in case, I am throwing the question out here in the forum.

Is this somehow feasible?

Thanks for any insights

rpsmith · Apr 3, 2020, 6:20 AM

I'm not a VM guy but I routinely edit my xml config files to change the interface type before restoring it to a different hardware platform.

Also, if you don't already have an xml editor, this is the free one I use: http://www.pnotepad.org/download/

Roy...

Rico · Apr 3, 2020, 5:51 AM

Generally speaking this works just without any problems. Check the docs https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/backup/configuration-backup-and-restore.html

-Rico

McDing · Apr 3, 2020, 6:24 AM

@Rico said in Possible to transfer config from VM to Netgate appliance?:

https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/backup/configuration-backup-and-restore.html

Thank you both! That is great news

While I have been backing my configs for a long time, I never had to restore them. So I wasn't aware of this feature:

Configuration files can be restored to a completely different piece of hardware without issue. If the new target hardware has different NICs than the system where the backup was taken, a prompt will appear to re-assign the NICs after restoring the configuration.

That is very helpful indeed!

rpsmith · Apr 3, 2020, 6:40 AM

@McDing
I guess you learn something new every day. I always changed my config file before uploading it so I never saw this prompt to select new interfaces. Very Cool!

Roy...