PfSense VMware-Ready Virtual Firewall Appliance Feedback
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I have no idea why a VMware ready image is so 'limited' in resources, after all when using it in our production servers we want to add quite a lot to it. Just curious how different this image it is in comparing it with a 'normal' VM installation, does it have some intellect on board. I noticed your remark about the NICs and VMXNET3, but for that you need VMware tools and not sure if the open-vm tools can address that. Have you done some proper testing?
FreeBSD 10.1 includes drivers for vmxnet3, the tools are no longer required for that. The VM appliance comes preconfigured for vmxnet3 interfaces.
5GB is not "limited" for what most people use pfSense for inside or outside a VM. It may not be enough for a large web cache but that is not as common a role as one might think. Adding a second disk to the VM is another option, though also manual, it would likely be less work/fuss than resizing the existing disk/slice. Just partition/newfs the second disk, make a mountpoint, and add it to /etc/fstab
In terms of RAM sizing it has to be fairly low to play to the lowest common denominator but that's simple for people to change.
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Thanks jimp. I totally agree - i am an outlier, in that I've got specific needs that require me to have some more space on the device in case the remote logging goes offline for a period of time - don't want the box to fill up and likewise don't wnat to lose the logs. My "home" pfsene box is running with 2 gigs of ram and a 4 gig USB stick for storage, nanobsd version of pfsense, and works a treat, even on a crappy old atom CPU. The defualts chosen should work fine for many people, as you say.
I should test adding a second partition - I am using the syslog-ng package to feed encrypted logs to a remote system, and I'm also keeping those syslog-ng logs local for a period of time. I don't know if I can tell the package to write someplace other than the default location, if I can I'll simply add the partition and go.
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Has anybody managed to deploy the OVF Image with the VMware vSphere web client? I get an error saying that the OVF package might be invalid.
As there were no MD5 or SHA1 sums on the gold portal download page, I can't verify if the download is broken.Anyway the SHA1 sum of my OVF image is: 80bc8c9feab42afe2a65c9fafcb8bbfd8fbeb401 pfsense_2.2.2__34019.ovf
Deploying OVF images from VMware (e.g. vSphere Operations Manager) works without any problem, so I think there is an issue with the image.
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I haven't tried that myself, though we use that internally so I think that was tested but I'd have to confirm with the person who made the image.
The SHA1 appears to be correct, here are some other hashes for that file:
MD5: 0d15cb0132f86e44b794f52d5f4713ac
SHA1: 80bc8c9feab42afe2a65c9fafcb8bbfd8fbeb401
SHA256: 05f1cbd673b50178067d6dddf44abfd5798c68dc78a47c1a789127d17fbafafc -
…This is where it might be a little scary - the system won't boot into the shell - instead, you see this:
simply type in
ufs:/dev/da0s1a
and hit enter, then hit enter again to get to the # prompt.I change into /sbin again, and issue ./growfs /dev/da0s1a again:
and a gpart show after:
Now we need a swap file again:
./gpart add -t freebsd-swap da0s1
After that, I activated the swap by issuing ./swapon /dev/da0s1b , but rebooting should take care of it.
I type exit and hit enter to reboot, then do an option 5 once the console menu comes up to reboot again. After a normal boot, choose option 8 to get to the command prompt and do a gpart show (it's in the path now), and you should see your expanded partition.So far, it hasn't given me any trouble. If I've made any obivous mistakes in here, please let me know.
snm777's instructions worked for me! Thanks!
Couple of additional issues
Got a warning that the swap file size was larger then the kernel config allowed.
Backed it down to 4GB and it was fine.
Steps:
./gpart delete -i 2 da0s1
./gpart add -t freebsd-swap -s 4G da0s1
./swapon /dev/da0s1b
./exit
hit enter to reboot
option 5 once the console menu comes up to reboot again.
After a normal boot, choose option 8 to get to the command prompt
./gpart show
No further complaints about swap file size.I also got the mountroot> issue every time I rebooted.
I mounted using smn777's mount command: ufs:/dev/da0s1a
Once pfsense was running I looked at fstab and foud some strange entries for the root and swap partitions.
I performed ls /etc nd saw that thee was fstab and fstab.old files using vi.
I looked at fstab.old and the entries were what should have been in fstab.Device Mountpoint FStype Options Dump Pass#
/dev/ada0s1a / ufs rw 1 1
/dev/ada0s1b none swap sw 0 0
I replaced fstab with fstab.old
./mv /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.old2
./mv /etc/fstab.old /etc/fstab
After that, I was able to reboot successfully.
