PFSense nanobsd on Alix2d3
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Guys,
I'm probably going to get an hear full for posting this but…....
After 3 days of trial and error I cannot for the life of me get a nanobsd image to boot on my Alix2d3! I've read all the related posts I could find on the subject, built images with different sector sizes, with packet mode, nopacket mode, verified that my BIOS is v0.99H etc etc.I could not boot even the pre-built PFSense 2G nanobsd image!
So finally after running out of ideas,I stoped using the ported dd for windows and decided to copy the image with dd from a Ubuntu live CD.
FINALLY I was able to boot my brand new board (I was starting to think it was DOA!) with both 512MB pfsense image and 2G pfsense image! Hurray!But MY 512MB and 2GB nanobsd images do NOT boot!!! Not a kernel issue or anything like that. It shows me 1 FreeBSD and 2 FreeBSD and then / and just sits there! No boot.confi -h.
Can someone PLEASE share a nanobsd configuration file that works (perhaps the pfsense one) on 2GB CF??Any ideas, hints, whatever would be highly appreciated even though this is not related to pfsense per say.
Thank you in advance.
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The images work fine on my ALIX, on any I've tried, and on a batch of 6 I just configured for a customer in the past few days. I've used 1GB, 2GB, and 4GB images all without problems. I've used several different versions of 1.2.3-RC(1, 2, 3) and so on, and haven't really had a problem booting that wasn't due to how the card was written, or the card itself.
I have had problems using cards written from within a Virtualbox VM, but I have written them with physdiskwrite/physgui on windows (XP, Vista, 7) without issue. That said, most of my imaging is done on an actual FreeBSD workstation.
At the point it boots, there is no real "config" file that will alter anything. As you said you have the 0.99h BIOS, but you may want to check that your BIOS is set for CHS mode for IDE/CF.
You might try to decompress the image file before you write it, if you haven't tried that yet. Otherwise, refer to the installation article on the Doc wiki which has more concrete instructions on how to write images to CF in various OS flavors.
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Thanks so much for the quick response Jimp.
Would it be too much to ask if you can share the nanobsd config file?
Particularly the NANO_MEDIASIZE and the NANO_BOOT0CFG settings. Are you using packet mode or nopacket?Thank you so much.
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If I'm understanding you properly,
- You managed to get a nano snapshot loaded.
- You are now having trouble getting a custom nano image to boot.
If I've got that right, you should post in the development forum and include some more details as to how you are building your image.
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NanoBSD requires packet mode on ALIX, I don't think it will boot without it (if it does it would only boot the first slice)
The mediasize doesn't really matter, I haven't built one in a while. The sizes are listed in the builder script (builder_common.sh I think)
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This is an old post, but I just wanted to update.
I was working on a WAN Emulation project and I wanted to use Alix/NanoBSD as base.
Since you guys have IMHO the best BSD based project I wanted to learn from you.Everything has been resolved and is working beautifully. It even have it using the front LED's to indicate if WAN Emulation is enabled and if there is traffic on any port. :P