[SOLVED] Kernel modules in pfSense 2.1

romain-mks

Dear all,

I am running a piece of hardware (3 Ethernet controllers, 4 USB ports and 1 VGA adapter, 1 SDcard slot and 1 power ON/OFF button :o) under pfSense-2.1-RELEASE-nanobsd.

I want to use it as load-balancer (multiwan) / failover and Captive Portal.
The ideal setup will be Dual Wan + 3G dongle failover.

Anyway, one of my interface is not recognized. It is a VTE interface (see http://www.rootr.net/man/man/vte/4) and I know that loading the if_vte.ko module at boot time would solve the issue (by adding the line if_vte_load="YES" to /boot/loader.conf).
However, if_vte.ko is not in the /boot/kernel/ directory or anywhere else in the system.

Does anyone knows why ? What is the way in nanoBSD to add such modules ? Should I compile a custom version of nanoBSD with appropriate modules ?
I don't find any kind of repository or even similar problems on forums so I assume I take the problem in a wrong way.

Thanks very much.

robi

I think you only need to take that .ko file from any other FreeBSD system, which is FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE-p11, and put it in the correct directory. You can even compile that module from source, if you have it.

stephenw10

If it really isn't included in the kernel, which may or may not be true, you can get it here:
http://files.pfsense.org/jimp/ko-8.3/i386/if_vte.ko
Put it in /boot/modules.

Steve

romain-mks

@robi : Thanks for the answer, I was not sure about that but was suspecting it. Thanks. I could run it as a virtual machine and get that file. However, our Internet is so slow here (so the need of load-balancing) that downloading a 600MB file is a pain !

@stephenw10 : Thanks for the file !

I will try that asap.

You advise me to put it in /boot/modules, but will loader.conf find it at boot or should I run first```
kldload /boot/modules/if_vte.ko

stephenw10

Yes, loader.conf will find it in /boot/modules. Better to use loader.conf.local, create that file.
You can load it manually from anywhere though to test it.

Steve

romain-mks

OK, that's done and it works great. Thanks for your help ! (How to mark as SOLVED ?)

But why loader.conf.local and not loader.conf ?

stephenw10

You can probably still edit your first post to mark it solved. There's no formal way of doing it.

The loader.conf.local file is for additional settings above the defaults. It gets copied across a firmware update where as the loader.conf file may not. However the contents of /boot/modules will not be copied so you may want to keep a copy of the module in /conf for easy access after an update.

Steve

romain-mks

Great ! Thank you Steve.