2.7.2 image has serial terminal turned off
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I installed 2.72 on a PCEngines/Negate apu1d4 appliance today. That machine has serial but no vga. I am familiar with making sure my serial configuration aligns with the coreboot bios and with pfSense, but I was surprised when my serial terminal went dark or stopped sharing information when I began booting pfSense. I was able to connect to the web interface and found that the serial console is disabled in the default configuration in the installation image of 2.72. So even if you do get the serial speeds, parity, and stop-bit numbers correct, you'll still get no serial console output on 2.72 until you use the web interface to turn on the serial console on the System>Advanced page, in the Serial Communications section.
Suggestion: enable the Serial Terminal in the default configuration of the 2.72 install, so that folks installing on non-vga-capable machines will be able to see and configure pfSense via serial cable.
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@jupiters_spot if you used the legacy installer, did you use the serial installation medium?
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I used Balena etcher to load the image onto a USB stick. I connected my USB-Serial cable and null-modem cable from desktop to Netgate appliance's serial port, inserted USB stick, and applied power to Netgate. In the serial terminal I ran the installer fine, with everything displaying normally, I was able to configure LAN and WAN ports and ip configuration, and completed the installation. Upon reboot the serial console showed the Netgate booting and running through coreboot, but output ceased as soon as pfSense began to load.
I'm not sure if that counts as using the serial installation medium.
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@jupiters_spot said in 2.72 image has serial terminal turned off:
load the image onto a USB stick
Sure, but what image? Downloaded from the Netgate Store (for $0) Netgate doc: Download Installation Media? That should support serial and VGA and it would be a bug or shortcomming if it doesn't.
Or did you download the legacy image (like from https://atxfiles.netgate.com/mirror/downloads/)?
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Yeah you need to use either the memstick-serial legacy image or enable serial console in the Net Installer to get the console after install.
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I used the Netgate store to download this image. The image @stephenw10 linked to as memstick-serial legacy isn't immediately apparent to me in the list of images available on the store.
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The download provides a file (netgate-installer-amd64.img.gz) that results in netgate-installer-v1.0-RC-amd64-20240919-1435.img
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Yes, if you use the Net Installer from the store you have to select the serial console in the advanced settings where I linked above. In known hardware it recognises that is automatically set.
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@stephenw10 - I totally missed that screen in the install where I could have enabled Console Serial, my mistake. I still think it might be good to toggle that value so that the default is to enable serial. Thanks for all for the help.
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Yeah it definitely could be more obvious. Maybe even a required step in the installer because the installer itself boots to both consoles.
