Access embedded pfSense without serial?

trentdk

Embedded 4gig: Is there anyway to get to the system on its first boot, without using a serial port? (there is not one). SSH, web?

jimp

What kind of hardware are you running on?

If it's an ALIX or Soekris (or other system with Via Rhine NICs) it should default to vr0 as LAN and vr1 as WAN. Plug into LAN, and you should pull an IP and can reach the web interface.

If you have no serial access and you are not using one of those devices, you would need to hand-edit the config to have the proper network interfaces for LAN and WAN on your hardware. If you had serial access, it would be prompting to set the interfaces.

trentdk

Ah yes. I ran the LiveCD just for fun, and I remember the prompts it displayed.

I'm running it on a PC, I just did not want to use a HDD, or any combination of optical/cf/usb. Ideally, I want just one CF card with minimal writes.

To continue with my setup, it seems I have two options:

Hand-edit the config
Try the 1.2.3 (1gb) release from these guys, enabling VGA/keyboard (trying that now)

If I wanted to do the former option, is there a tutorial or how-to on hand-editing the config?

jimp

Not really a tutorial, but it's all XML and pretty well laid out so it should be easy to find the spot where you need to edit the interfaces.

It would look something like:

	 <interfaces><lan><if>vr0</if></lan></interfaces>

Replace vr0 with whatever network card you are using for LAN.

As for actually getting to the config, there are some tips here:
http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Modifying_Embedded