Bare Metal Conversion Assistance Request

Falklan

Howdy all!

I'm about to convert from an older i5 Haswell system to AMD 3700x hardware, and I have a simple question.

I presume a new pfSense installation on the new hardware.

Would I use a pfSense full configuration backup to restore the configuration to the new hardware?

Unless I missed this somewhere, I have not found DIY information for updating bare metal hardware. Maybe I need to hold my mouth right while googling or something...

Konan 0

You'll have to match the interface names up if they're different. Although IIRC, when you upload the old config if there's a mismatch it'll prompt you to reassign them.

I tend to quickly do it in the XML before I upload.

Falklan

@Konan-0 meaning similar to igb0, igb1, igb2 etcetera?

Konan 0

Yes. The prefix of your network adapters is based on the driver, so they might be igb, igc, ix, re etc etc

Falklan

@Konan-0 Thank you sir! It's much appreciated!

🤟

johnpoz

@Falklan From my understanding if you need help converting a config to new hardware - tac is willing to help with that.. Pretty sure I have seen @stephenw10 mention that before.

Falklan

@johnpoz Thanks for the information!

KOM

@Konan-0 Just make sure you pay attention. I got burned by this once. I thought a quick find & replace would do. Turns out one of my certificates just happened to have the NIC prefix in it just by chance and my text operation happily changed it. I hosed the cert without realizing until some stuff stopped working.

luckman212

@KOM good tip. I suggest a text editor that supports regex find and replace (e.g. Sublime, VSCode etc) so you can do something like

Find: \bem2\b
Replace: ix0

I guess >em2< could work too in a pinch

Konan 0

@KOM Been there! Broken that!

Gertjan

@Falklan said in Bare Metal Conversion Assistance Request:

Would I use a pfSense full configuration backup to restore the configuration to the new hardware?

You saw the short answer : NIC. These can be different in the new system. You know now what to do.
Years ago, I bought a quad NIC Intel card and thought : I move the card over with the config, so no more NIC driver name issues for me.
Great .. yes ? well, no.
My new system numbered the NIC index differently on boot = hardware was recognized with another order, but the other way around. Probably some BIOS PCI detection difference.
em0 became em4, em1 became em3 and so on.
So my WAN (and rules) was actually my LAN, etc. I go myself into a self inflicted security issue, pfSense all being ( and me not).

So, short answer : the pfSense config backup is for 99,9+ % hardware independent. It is hardware dependent for anything between the 99,9 and 100 %.
This means : the pfSense admin still needs his brain to handle the 0,1 %, using common sense etc to handle the transfer.

See it like this :
Dump the windows registry on 'a PC'.
Import it on another PC.
Brace for impact.

Konan 0

@Gertjan This one was a total head scratcher because it's such an odd fault the symptoms were random and inconsistent. I spent about half a day in the shell before I clocked this on the console...

Factory fault on a 3NIC daughterboard.

Gertjan

@Konan-0

ah .. ok, not-lol.
Was that your NIC I saw flying out of the window ?

Konan 0

@Gertjan When I tried to send it back to the supplier, they said 'no no, NICs all defiantely have different MAC addresses, I think you're mistaken'

The reason I have that photo was so I could say 'this one doesn't'

stephenw10

Yikes. Yeah that;s going to screw you up whatever method you use to import the config.

@johnpoz said in Bare Metal Conversion Assistance Request:

From my understanding if you need help converting a config to new hardware - tac is willing to help with that.

In general that only applies to importing to/between Netgate hardware.

johnpoz

@stephenw10 yeah that would make sense ;)

Falklan

I was simply trying to make it easier. I don't have a very complex config. pfBlocker, NTP sync'd, unbound resolver etcetera. Nothing major like VLANs or anything. I wanted to configure those types of things on the new hardware.

stephenw10

If you don't have a bunch of sub-interfaces you should just be able to import the config into the new install. It will ask you to re-assign the interfaces if the NICs are different. Then it will reboot into the config.

Falklan

@stephenw10 That was my plan. Either way is fine by me. Manually edit after install, or I can edit the xml config file.