I have been running Opnsense on an HP T620 plus for about 8 months now and have been adding/activating features.
Especially Sensei has been pushing the hardware to the limit, more specifically the 16 GB SSD.
Last week I noticed the dashboard was reporting 104% disk usage.
This happened the day after I had been adding a number of wifi devices (Shelly smart switches etc) and had been playing with VLANs.
Anyway, even with Sensei reporting data retention set to 1 day (instead of the default 2), disk usage is currently at 89%.
So I bought a new 250 GB SSD.
Overkill, but it came down to the GB/€ ratio.
My question is, how do I best upgrade the SSD?
I've read that I could export the settings, install Opnsense on the new SSD and then import the settings, but I have a few questions before I do that:
- Are all settings being exported, also those for plugins like Sensei or Suricata? Sensei for example has its own option to export the configuration.
- Does it automatically reinstall the plugins you had, or just restore the previous settings after you manually add those plugins?
- Will I run into issues with my ACME certificates? Will they continue to refresh, or do I need to set this up again, because perhaps the secret key changes?
- The installation documentation (https://docs.opnsense.org/manual/install.html) talks about the Opnsense Importer. If you are installing Opnsense using a USB memory stick, does this mean you need a separate memory stick with the config files you exported, or can it be the same as the installation stick?
If you have an external storage device (NAS, USB, etc.) I would give Clonezilla a go: https://clonezilla.org/downloads.php
Create a complete, external, off-line snapshot for your old SSD and write it intelligently back to the new disk. You'll need to expand the 16 GB partition after copying. You can use a GUI for this step: https://gparted.org/livecd.php
Bart...
Hmm, so burn an iso of clonezilla to backup the ssd to my nas. Then switch the ssd and clone it back. Finally burn an iso for gparted to extend the partition?
That's what I use :D It's a bit easier with PXE boot images but a couple of small USB sticks work fine.
This option is faster since it copies locally: https://www.wavlink.com/en_us/product/WL-ST334U.html but clearly not as ubiquitous.
Bart...
Ok, I've prepared two bootable drives, one external HD for Clonezilla, with enough space left to save the cloned drive, and a small thumbdrive with gparted.
After the wife leaves tonight, I'll bring down the Opnsense machine and perform the surgery :)
Fingers crossed!
So cloning went smoothly with Clonezilla.
I now have the new SSD in the machine and written the clone back.
This all works, Opnsense boots but still sees just 16 GB.
The problem now is that Gparted doesn't want to extend the rootfs partition to include the unallocated space, whatever I try...
I suspect Gparted can't work with UFS partitions.
Luckily I still have the old SSD, the clone on a separate drive and even a backup of the config, so I can experiment a bit on the new SSD.
But in the meantime the wife is back home, so I need to hurry up ;)
I managed to do it, using the discussion here (https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=19250.0)!
I booted and opened a shell, then did:
- gpart show and took note of the index of the partition I wanted to extend, 3 in my case.
- Then I did gpart resize -i 3 ada0 to assign the unallocated space to the rootfs partition.
- df -h to find the filesystem name for rootfs, which is /dev/gpt/rootfs in my case.
- Now grow that filesystem with growfs /dev/gpt/rootfs and finally check if it worked with df -h
I just rebooted and it worked!