Pfsense 2.01 nano problems on cf card
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hi,
i have a few questions concerning the installation on a cf card i am using physdiskwrite for this:
My problem:
first the image was to big because of the cards are actually smaller then the image ( can i do somenthing about that ?? )
So i arranged for a new card:
problem with these cards:
i start writing the image useing the -u switch …. (4gb nano i386)
the strange thing: it stops somewhere after the 2gb with writing but doesn't display any errors ???
When i put it in my alix firewall it works pefecty ??? Should i trust this ????
Afterward i tried to write the 2gb image to the 4gb card, now it writes every bit till the end, i guess it's just fine to write a 2gb image on a 4gb card ?? I guess it's just less space for logs ??
The strange thing with this image, i am using pppoe connection on wan:
with the 2gb image on a 4gb card the wan connection gets broken every minute (i don't have that problem with the card that stops writing after 2gb ??? )
My main concern is here if i can trust the 4gb nano image that writes only slightly more than 2gb but seems to work fine ??
And is it ok to write a 2gb image on a 4gb card
thanks in advance
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Afterward i tried to write the 2gb image to the 4gb card, now it writes every bit till the end, i guess it's just fine to write a 2gb image on a 4gb card ??
Yes. The size part of the image name says how much will be written to the destination device. Thus writing the 2G image to a 8GB card will leave about 6GB of the card "unused".
I guess it's just less space for logs ??
No, I believe logs are kept in RAM in the nanoBSD variant of pfSense to avoid frequent small writes to the disk. The more space you have in the nanBSD variant the more space is available for installation of packages.
My main concern is here if i can trust the 4gb nano image that writes only slightly more than 2gb but seems to work fine ??
Actually the program reported that it wrote just under 4GB (see the last line before of its output).
The warning about 2GB is because the binary representation of 210241024*1024 in 32 bits is a negative number when the bits are interpreted as "signed". This has confused some operating systems and some poorly written applications (for example, applications that used "signed" variables to hold file sizes rather than "unsigned" variables).In your particular case it is not clear clear (to me) whether the program is reporting "I wrote x bytes to a device capable of holding y bytes" (in which case every thing that should be on the output device is probably there) or it is reporting "I wrote x bytes to the device out of the "y" bytes I should have written (in which case the output device is probably missing something important). Maybe if I had the screenshot in front of me while composing this reply I would be clearer about what exactly it is reporting.
Edit: Now that I have had a second look at the screenshot I would read its report as I successfully wrote all x bytes I should have written to the output device which is capable of holding y bytes. I would expect failures to write data to the output device would be reported. Therefore both image writes (2G and 4G) appear to have been successful. I suggest you report the broken pppoe connection in a separate topic with the contents of the ppp log (Status -> System Logs, click on PPP tab)
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Ok,
thanks for the reply and since i rarely install a package the missing space won't be a real problem but as you said everything is probably ok.
That is what i was thinking because everything works fine on the box.
happy hollidays
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Hi conehead,
On your screen the size reported is close than 4Go.
I had the same question when I wrote a 4Go image, because physdiskwrite reported less byte than total byte written…
In fact writen byte equal exactly the file size of image (see attached file).
Did you check your real file size ?