Watchguard T70 and OPNsense questions

[nero355]

The SSD seemed to be unmountable on my Linux machine, but I have never used FreeBSD, so have no idea whether FreeBSD formatted drives would mount on Linux anyway so I assumed that this behaviour was probably to be expected.

That is correct indeed : My USB Stick with OPNsense never gets mounted by Debian or Kubuntu Linux either :)

If you want to check if it has been written correctly then consider using a FreeBSD Live Boot environment for the whole process.



_{(Before you ask :
Yes, there are some ways to have Linux read FreeBSD stuff and also have FreeBSD read Linux stuff, but it's not really recommended so let's skip the whole thing in this case and keep everything native!)}

[LaForge]

Ok, so I downloaded the 'nano' image. According to the documentation, this still uses the serial console for initial access and configuration. Since this is a "pre-installed" image, I was able to just copy it directly from the PC to the mSata drive and then put the drive into the T70. It boots up in a very similar way to the serial image, but, it doesn't allow log in as user install, only as root. This, of course, makes sense, since in this image, OPNsense is already pre-installed. Connecting with a browser to 192.168.1.1 shows the OPNsense login page and upon login, the configuration wizard.

I still need to carry out the mod on my T70, so will continue the exploration once this has been done, but at least the 'nano' image does seem to provide a way forward and gets around the serial image installation 3Gb memory requirement. I had read that it requires 2GB, but evidently that has increased at some point.

I am curious: is the 3GB RAM requirement for installing the 'serial' image because the OPNsense install image is being unpacked to RAM? Or is it just a co-incidence that the pre-installed 'nano' image is 3.0Gb in size? I am using 32Gb msata drives. Could it not have been unpacked to the drive instead? Also, is it possible to create and make use of a partition on the remaining 29Gb or so of the msata drive, which appears to be unused at present?

The SSD seemed to be unmountable on my Linux machine, but I have never used FreeBSD, so have no idea whether FreeBSD formatted drives would mount on Linux anyway so I assumed that this behaviour was probably to be expected.

That is correct indeed : My USB Stick with OPNsense never gets mounted by Debian or Kubuntu Linux either :)

If you want to check if it has been written correctly then consider using a FreeBSD Live Boot environment for the whole process.

_{(Before you ask :
Yes, there are some ways to have Linux read FreeBSD stuff and also have FreeBSD read Linux stuff, but it's not really recommended so let's skip the whole thing in this case and keep everything native!)}

I haven't used FreeBSD before but having logged in at the console and selected the Shell option, I see that standard Linux commands seem to work, although I expect that there are differences. I might just set FreeBSD up in a virtual machine to have a look at, but that's another project.