Odd Serial Console issue after upgrading from pfSense

[mgsteve]

We've got an old (probably a few years old) Dual A10 Quad Core SSD OPNSense firewall unit which was running pfsense and it worked fine, but I thought I'd give opnSense a try as I'm interested in the ETPro Telemetry feature, which isn't on pfSense.

Anyway, I connected the serial lead for console access and installed opnSense 20.7 off the usb and everything was fine until it booted up in opnSense for the first time, ever since then the serial port is acting as if the settings are wrong. As far as I know the defaults are the same between pfSense and opnSense and I use the same screen command, just passing the 115200 baud rate.

However, opnsense simply doesn't want to play ball. Or if it does, it displays the login prompt, i type "roo" as in the start of 'root' and that's it, it locks up again. Most of the time I'm just looking at a blank screen. For the first bit of the boot process it works and then again it stops scrolling and refreshes the current line until finally ending up at the login prompt.

For comparison we never had an issue when running pfSense, so its defintely related to opnSense.

I can logon to via the browser, but the console was a useful backup option to have, if I can get it to work again.

Anyone got any ideas?

[mgsteve]

pfft! This is always the way. You try and fix something for an hour, write a forum post about it, post the post and then immediately solve it.

For some unfathomable reason all I needed to do was unplug and then plug back in the USB cable on the server!

I plugged into it my PC and putty connected fine, tried screen, that worked fine, plugged it back into the server, re-ran the same command I'd run not 5 mins before and it now works.

Oh well, onto the fun of replicating the pfSense setup from the other pfSense box in the rack!