RCC-VE installation
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I've been dorking around with this for an hour. Thank you for the quick fix! I'm so excited about this little box.
I'm also worried about losing the built-in CentOS install. Does Netgate ever make stock images/installers available? I might try to boot off another medium and `dd' an image of the original OS as a backup.
I'm pretty sure the QSG tells you how to PXE boot the CentOS install remotely.
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@gonzopancho:
I'm pretty sure the QSG tells you how to PXE boot the CentOS install remotely.
Sweet. The URL they gave me for the QSG (https://firmware.netgate.com/qsg/) comes up blank, so I've been flying a bit blind here. I did find a user manual for the RCC-VE platform but it didn't have anything in there about where I could find firmware images and how I could reinstall the factory operating system.
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Don't be sorry for asking questions! That's what the forum's for. I'm just a newbie trying to wrap my head around this myself.
A fresh install won't boot, period, unless you fix the device names in /etc/fstab on the target device (i.e. the partition of the eMMC where /etc is). And you won't be able to see anything unless you fix the console settings in /boot/loader.conf.
Oh, I didn't even notice the fstab modifications, makes sense. Thanks for all the info/help.
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Another tweak…
Certain intel igb cards, especially multi-port cards, can very easily exhaust mbufs and cause kernel panics, especially on amd64. The following tweak will prevent this from being an issue:
In /boot/loader.conf.local - Add the following (or create the file if it does not exist):
kern.ipc.nmbclusters="1000000"
That will increase the amount of network memory buffers, allowing the driver enough headroom for its optimal operation.EDIT: gonzopancho says don't do this, it's idiotic. See his post explaining why later in the thread…
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I successfully patched a USB-stick and was able to completely boot a 4G embedded image.
Because I had a mSATA disk I now wanted to try it with the installer.I made a new USB and patched the 0x2f8 on that install stick.
I could completely run the installer but then after a reboot it did the same as before and I lost terminal access.I think the installer made a new loader.conf for the SATA-disk and didn't add that "0x2f8" so all output is going to COM1…
Where can I find the source file that the installer is using to make a new loader.conf????
Because I'm not that "BSD" I have difficulty mounting the SATA-disk and changing loader.conf on the installed partition.
Edit: I had difficulty mounting the Sata-partition, because it was unclean. Did a fsck and now it's running.... I will have some other problems soon, I guess...
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Also…
For about $60 I installed a 64GB Plextor mSATA SSD. That allowed me to keep the CentOS installation on the 4GB of eMMC. According to ADI's documentation, there are some utilities installed there you may want to keep. Also, it could be possibly a good debugging OS in case something in pfSense goes really sideways.The boot loader defaults to booting from the mSATA instead of the eMMC if it's installed, which worked out great in my case. I didn't see anything in the documentation about changing the boot order.
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Also…
For about $60 I installed a 64GB Plextor mSATA SSD. That allowed me to keep the CentOS installation on the 4GB of eMMC. According to ADI's documentation, there are some utilities installed there you may want to keep. Also, it could be possibly a good debugging OS in case something in pfSense goes really sideways.I agree. I am currently running pfSense on the eMMC, but would like to have the CentOS as well. As soon as Netgate posts the QSG (https://firmware.netgate.com/qsg) or gives us instructions and how to restore the factory image then I will probably buy an mSATA drive and throw pfSense on there.
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According to ADI's documentation, there are some utilities installed there you may want to keep.
Yeah, I saw those in the RCC-VE platform documentation. Hopefully the team has made or will make those utilities available from within FreeBSD/pfSense as well. Maybe I should have waited to buy a SG-2440…
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Another tweak…
Certain intel igb cards, especially multi-port cards, can very easily exhaust mbufs and cause kernel panics, especially on amd64. The following tweak will prevent this from being an issue:
In /boot/loader.conf.local - Add the following (or create the file if it does not exist):
kern.ipc.nmbclusters="1000000"
That will increase the amount of network memory buffers, allowing the driver enough headroom for its optimal operation.the kernel doesn't panic when you exhaust mbufs, it panics when you set this limit too high (and your number is too high), because
the system runs out of memory.For each mbuf cluster there is “mbuf” structure needed. These each consume 256 bytes, and are used to organize mbuf clusters in chains. An mbuf cluster takes another 2048 bytes (or more, for jumbo frames). There’s possibility to store some additional useful 100B data into the mbuf, but it is not always used.
When there are no free mbuf clusters available, FreeBSD enters the zonelimit state and stops answering network requests. You can see it as the
zoneli
state in the output of thetop
command. It doesn't panic, it appears to 'freeze' for network activity.If your box has 1GB of RAM or more, 25K mbuf clusters will be created by default. Occasionally this is not enough. If it is, then perhaps doubling that value, and maybe doubling again, are in order. But 1M mbuf clusters? Are you serious?
You just advised people to consume 1,000,000 mbuf clusters (at 2K each). Let me know if I need to explain how much RAM you needlessly advised people to allocate for no good purpose.
I am well-aware that someone wrote something completely uninformed here: https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Tuning_and_Troubleshooting_Network_Cards#mbuf_.2F_nmbclusters
so please don't quote it back to me. -
According to ADI's documentation, there are some utilities installed there you may want to keep.
Yeah, I saw those in the RCC-VE platform documentation. Hopefully the team has made or will make those utilities available from within FreeBSD/pfSense as well. Maybe I should have waited to buy a SG-2440…
You're misinformed. That CentOS factory image is ours, not ADI's.
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I am having an issue trying to get the Nano running.
Why are you running the nano image?
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@gonzopancho:
You're misinformed. That CentOS factory image is ours, not ADI's.
Oh, so it doesn't contain a modified version of the flashrom utility?
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@gonzopancho:
Why are you running the nano image?
On an RCC-VE I would have done just that without much thinking.
Nano images have the serial console instead of VGA and by default are r/o to save on wear from CF or even from an SSD.
Not? -
@gonzopancho:
Why are you running the nano image?
On an RCC-VE I would have done just that without much thinking.
Nano images have the serial console instead of VGA and by default are r/o to save on wear from CF or even from an SSD.
Not?No.
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@gonzopancho:
You're misinformed. That CentOS factory image is ours, not ADI's.
Oh, so it doesn't contain a modified version of the flashrom utility?
Tell me why you need the flashrom utility.
Here is a hint: if/when you do, it will be provided, with the new BIOS image.
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Then edit the /[mountlocation]/boot/loader.conf file to have an extra line underneath 'comconsole_speed="115200"' that reads 'comconsole_port="0x2f8"'
How do you edit the file?
I have used Win32 Disk Imager on a Windows machine to create the usb drive with pfSense.
Then I have added the usb device in Virtualbox so my VM Ubuntu can access it.
If I execute sudo fdisk -l I can see that /dev/sdb is my usb drive. With 2 partitions(?), /dev/sdb4 and /dev/sdb4p4.From here, I've had no success, and don't know what to do next.
My knowledge of the Linux world is very basic. -
https://snapshots.pfsense.org/FreeBSD_releng/10.1/amd64/pfSense_RELENG_2_2/livecd_installer/pfSense-memstick-ADI-2.2.2-DEVELOPMENT-amd64-20150401-1519.img.gz
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@gonzopancho:
https://snapshots.pfsense.org/FreeBSD_releng/10.1/amd64/pfSense_RELENG_2_2/livecd_installer/pfSense-memstick-ADI-2.2.2-DEVELOPMENT-amd64-20150401-1519.img.gz
Thanks for this, I've had quite a few requests from people for a copy of "my" image which I have not fulfilled so as to not violate your trademark :P
It's nice to know that these will have even minimal support for those of us too poor/cheap to buy the pfsense branded version!
Keep up the good work :)
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How do you edit the file?
I had some trouble getting it to mount read-write in Ubuntu. Apparently the read-write UFS driver for Linux is still a bit unstable so the Ubuntu kernel has the read-only driver.
I downloaded the FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE virtual machine image (.vmdk) and created a new VirtualBox VM with that image as the hard drive. Boot it up, attach the USB drive, get the device name from dmesg, mount the slice (when I get home tonight I can work out the exact command for you), and edit the file(s) as needed.
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@gonzopancho:
@gonzopancho:
You're misinformed. That CentOS factory image is ours, not ADI's.
Oh, so it doesn't contain a modified version of the flashrom utility?
Tell me why you need the flashrom utility.
Here is a hint: if/when you do, it will be provided, with the new BIOS image.
Sweet!