Migrating from M0n0wall to pfSense

During the last year,  talking with some colleages about firewalls and operative systems the mayor part of then said that they’re using, Pfsense instead M0n0wall. Recently I get a new job and my home networks are in the same range that the work network and some clients. To avoid this situation I decided migrate my router from M0n0wall to Pfsense and thats are the steps:

I decided maintain a copy of the actual M0n0wall config, bougth a new compact flash was the quick option.

Download pfSense

First I downloaded the version for my router, in this case it’s and ALIX Board without VGA,, that means that i need to choose the nanobsd version and my compactFlash size is 4Gb, if I had a bigger campactFlash I just only need to take the 4gb versión.

wget
wget

wget

Verify downloaded image:

md5sum pfSense-2.0.1-RELEASE-4g-i386-nanobsd.img.gz

and check if output it’s the same that content in /pfSense-2.0.1-RELEASE-4g-i386-nanobsd.img.gz.md5

sha256sum pfSense-2.0.1-RELEASE-4g-i386-nanobsd.img.gz

and check if output it’s the same that content in /pfSense-2.0.1-RELEASE-4g-i386-nanobsd.img.gz.sha256

Dump pfSense into the compact flash

In my case as fedora user i need to detect what device file is linked to my compactFlash i make this

open a root cosole and write

mount >mountedBefore

this generate a file with actual mounted files

i attach the compact flash and execute

mount >mountedAfter

now i write

diff mountedBefore mountedAfter

and the output will be like:

> /dev/sdd1 on /run/media/luzem/753C-3741 type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,uid=1000,gid=1000,fmask=0022,dmask=0077,codepage=cp437,iocharset=ascii,shortname=mixed,showexec,utf8,errors=remount-ro,uhelper=udisks2)

It said that my compact flash is on /dev/sdd file

first i need to umount it

umount /dev/sdd1

now i decompress and dump pfSense into compact flash writing

zcat pfSense-2.0.1-RELEASE-4g-i386-nanobsd.img.gz | dd of=/dev/sdd bs=16k

you should get and output like these

244138+1 records in
244138+1 records out
3999969792 bytes (4.0 GB) copied, 226.826 s, 17.6 MB/s

Putting pfSense into alix board

Now plug the compactFlash on your board

connect your board , power, ethernet ….

enjoy reconfiguring yout new router

alix 2d3

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