Restoring

Overcon

Hi All. I purchased a new PC to upgrade my pFsense system to. It is a:

Firewall Mini PC Celeron N5095 Quad Core 4* 2.5G Lans 2*DDR4 NVMe AES-NI pfSense Router PC Network Security Appliance.

I did a backup and on the new PC I installed pFsense and then I logged into the GUI and did a restore. It restores, but it gets to a point where it shows the interfaces as being up, but never proceeds past that. If I unplug or plug the network cables in, I see it say up or down, but it never moves on and never completes the restore.

For packages I have bandwidthd, Suricata and OpenVPNclient exporter. Can I export a backup without the packages?

Any ideas on why it is not completing the restore or booting? This is what I see where it just freezes.

Overcon

Well, I tried it without packages, same results. So I rebuilt it, but as soon as I restored NAT settings, I got the same issue on reboot. Not sure what is going on with that.

jimp

Looks like maybe your configuration is set to send the console output to the serial console and not video console. Whatever is happening would be logged on the other console.

darcey

Part suggestion, part question but I noticed config xml relates interfaces to device nodes.
If you restore a config to different hardware (with different device node names), might this possibly cause issues. You would need to edit the config prior to restoring or reassign interfaces and selectively restore?

stephenw10

Yeah you can see in the boot logs there:

Dual Console: Serial Primary, Video Secondary

And since that is a photograph of a monitor I assume it's not the serial console?

So it's probably booting exactly as expected and is waiting at the serial console for you to re-assign the interfaces to the new NICs.

You can force it to boot with the video console:
https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/troubleshooting/boot-issues.html#booting-with-an-alternate-console

Then once it boots you can set the video console as primary.

Or you could connect to the serial console.

Or you could change the console settings in the config before restoring it.

Steve

Overcon

You know, I had forgotten about that! I think I configured a serial port as part of an anti-lockout article I read (I think) and just forgot about it! I can turn that off and export the config again, or just see if I have a serial cable somewhere and use putty to connect.

I will try it tonight when I get home, thanks all!

Overcon

That worked. I was able to uncheck the serial option, saved a backup, and imported it with no problem. Thanks all for the help.