Installing pfsense on a soekris net-5501?
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I have a 40GB or so notebook HD already in the soekris - if I had known what I know now, I would have tried something different :) e.g. I did not know at the outset that usb cdroms were not supported with the soekris, so that plan went out the window. I have been googling and search various forums for help on how to get the full HD install to work. I've found various hints on this site but the most recent was sometime back in 2008 and did not indicate 100% success. What I seem to recall reading is suggestions to pull the HD out and put it on a regular PC/laptop, do a HD install from cdrom and then move the notebook HD back to the soekris. That is my fallback position, but I would dearly love to get this working over NFS or something. A number of posts on the forums here seem to no longer be valid. Am I SOL?
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Well, color me frustrated (to put it mildly.) I spent 2-3 hours moving the HD to my laptop and installing pfsense 1.2.3 on it, and then moving it back over. I plug in the soekris, and it prints the F1: pfsense message, and I hit enter. It then starts printing a zillion blank lines, finally stopping a minute or so later. Nothing I type in does anything useful. I saw posts online that suggested changing the console speed to 9600, which I did. Same deal. I saw a post by someone on the pfsense forum that said it might be there was no getty spawned for the serial console, and suggested editing /etc/inittab to add an entry for the serial console. How do I do that if I can't talk to the darn thing? Move the HD back to my laptop again and do this? Is there really no better way? Ugh!!!!
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OMG. Finally got it working. Required tweaks to a bunch of files to support serial console. Yeesh. It seems okay now, but I am wondering how the heck to back this up so I don't have to go through this rat screw if my hard drive has issues?
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You wanted the embedded install option, which is designed for a serial console.
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Sorry, I didn't mention that the whole reason for using a HD was because I wanted to be able to use packages :(
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Take a look at the new nano builds, which are embedded builds with package support.
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Hmmm, thanks, I will! I was going on the state of the art at the time :)
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Reading the blog entries about nanobsd, it refers to "packages suitable for an embedded environment" (quoting from memory). How would one tell if a package is compatible with the embedded nanobsd install?
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No idea :) However, you may simply find that it's a case of if you install anything write heavy (such as Squid) then you run the risk of destroying your solid state storage, so the risk is yours.
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Looking around, I've seen conflicting stories about how nanobsd works wrt packages. Having thought about it, I'm not sure it really matters at this point, since I have an HD install that works. My concern now is: how do I get a disk image backup so that if my HD dies, I can quickly re-image a new one and be back up and running. An embedded install won't really solve that for me. I think the way I want to go here is to set up my main server (linux based) to be a pxeboot server which can serve up a clonezilla-live setup, so I can plug in the new hard drive, boot from the network, restore the HD image from the ssh server and be good to go.
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You've got a host of options. The best is to take a direct image of the disk (with "dd").
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Yeah, I get that. What I want to avoid is having to disassemble the soekris, removing the HD from the PATA mounting kit, put it in an external USB drive, image it to (or from) and then put it back. Major PITA…
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Given the nature of the case, you've got few other choices at this point. If it had a VGA console there are a lot of other choices.
I'd normally suggest you boot from something like a live CD/USB drive and then image it across the network either to a file share or through use of netcat (nc). What you'd need to do is build yourself a custom install that will boot the system without VGA or PS/2 being present, configure the LAN interface with DHCP and then start an SSH server on the LAN interface. Then you'd SSH in and image it.
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Unfortunately, a soekris can't boot from a USB device :( Supposedly clonezilla will work with serial console, so if I can get the pxe stuff to work I should be all set. I'm kind of annoyed at myself for not doing my homework more thoroughly before going the soekris route, but what's done is done. Thanks for the suggestions!
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Okay, here's the latest. Got clonezilla-live to netboot okay. For some reason, it took about 7 minutes for the netboot code running on the 5501 to actually ask for vmlinuz :( That said, it came up fine (I have clonezilla tftp fetch filesystem.squashfs for the root filesystem). It did come up fine, but that brought up the second problem: the BSD filesystem is not supported by clonezilla, so it would do the lowest common denominator approach, which is a dd sector by sector imaging of the filesystem, which is on a 29GB hard drive, which sucks. I guess I need to take a step back and rethink this.
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One thing that may help: apparently the partition image tool used by clonezilla recently had UFS support added, so when that make it into the next clonezilla ISO, I will be in much better shape :)
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If you can netboot you should be able to netboot a FreeBSD system. The FreeBSD handbook and mailing lists should be able to help with that bit (never tried it myself).
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I did actually get freebsd to boot on the 5501, but pardon me for being dense here - how will that help me do my backup? I need something that can do a bare-metal restore (clonezilla works just fine for that), so solutions that involve doing a tar or somesuch to a remote filesystem are not helpful. Checking the partclone (what clonezilla uses) site, there is UFS support, but it seems not built by default, so maybe I can get them to do that. I also noticed extremely slow netboot (upwards of 7 minutes to start loading vmlinuz) - googling shows I am not remotely the only person having this issue, and it doesn't seem unique to soekris - I've heard different things like setting enet speed and duplex manually, etc… I haven't had a chance to try this yet.
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Well, that is a bummer. I ran a packet sniffer while doing a netboot. There is a delay of almost exactly 7 minutes, during which I see an occasional '.' printed on the soekris console, but (key point here) NO network traffic. None. It's like it's trying to do something that isn't working and timing out. Again, I have seen references to this 7 minute or so delay elsewhere, but with no resolution. soekris website has a link to a mailing list, but the server there is down :( I may just have to give this up as a bad idea and e-bay the net-5501. Havoc, I do appreciate the suggestions, though (didn't want you to think I was not appreciative…)
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Well, good news. The syslinux on my rhel5 system was ancient. Got a much newer pxelinux and she comes right up. Now, I just need to get UFS support from partimage/partclone :)
