Installer lockups on ESXi madness, plus ZFS installation

[Gcon]

I last tried OPNsense seriously around the time of 19.1 and was amazed that the installer had multiple lockups.

A couple of years on from that with 21.1 I am trying again, and am gobsmacked that the same installer bugs still exist:- once when choosing "guided install" and again at the swap partition size.   Each time I have to go "CTRL-C" and log back in again as installer/opnsense. Incredible.

I am on standard ESXI 6.5 with latest patches.  UEFI.  Nothing unusual. Sure you can get around it searching around the Internet and eventually stumbing on the multiple CTRL-C re-login workaround (if you dig deep), but this is just not good enough for any software which wants to be taken seriously. I can imagine thousands of techs trying out OPNsense for the first time and abandoning it right there, being scared off from the very start at the quality of the software, or lack thereof.... which is exactly my experience now on multiple ocassions!

Will "Migrate bsdinstaller to bsdinstall" fix this long-standing and very important issue? If it does, then it can't come soon enough? Also will that include install on ZFS? I am OK with UFS installs for my virtualised environments, but there's no way I'm putting UFS on my stand-alone firewall boxes, when others offer ZFS as root install options.

[phoenix]

Did you report these 'bugs' on github? FWIW, I currently run OPNsense on ESXi 6.7 and previously on 6.5 without any problems installing it.

[franco]

Yes, UEFI (as witnessed by Gen2 on HyperV too) can trigger crashes in the ancient ncurses library used in the old installer.

> Will "Migrate bsdinstaller to bsdinstall" fix this long-standing and very important issue?

I disagree about this assertion, but we will do it for 21.7 to clear the item from the list of things that a lot of people like to complain about but will also not help us in the open source scope to reach that goal.


Cheers,
Franco

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Why not install the VM with legacy BIOS boot? As far as I know this won't go away in ESXi any time soon.

[franco]

FWIW, ZFS installs now work for our live images using https://github.com/opnsense/installer

Some utility work and extensive testing to be done still, but 21.7 is definitely going to have it.


Cheers,
Franco