Archive > 17.7 Legacy Series

[SOLVED] I really have to sit through this LiveCD B.S. to install now?

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CloudHoppingFlowerChild:
I've been using opnsense for something like a year. No problems at home, just installed and I've been updating every time an update comes out. Now I'm just trying to setup a totally new opnsense system and it seems like I have no choice but to sit through this 30+ minute boot-up to the live environment and then what? I've been googling trying to find out how to "fix" this incredible boot time and in doing so I read that after this BS I have to then clone the live-cd system to the disk via command line ( https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=4649.0 ) ? That's not covered in the documentation ( https://docs.opnsense.org/manual/install.html ), in fact, the installation doesn't seem to be covered in the installation documentation at all. The end result may be great but this is now an __awful__ installation experience.

phoenix:
If you got your install image from the download page here: https://opnsense.org/download/  - you would have found the installation instructions and you'd have found out how to install it to a HD: https://opnsense.org/users/get-started/

franco:
Yes, if your boot takes that long, which is probably a hardware issue. You could also try updating the BIOS, some people reported this is an issue with the UEFI boot compatibility.


Respectfully,
Franco

CloudHoppingFlowerChild:
I think the problem is one of expectations.


--- Quote from: phoenix on August 27, 2017, 08:46:59 am ---If you got your install image from the download page here: https://opnsense.org/download/  - you would have found the installation instructions and you'd have found out how to install it to a HD: https://opnsense.org/users/get-started/

--- End quote ---

Phoenix, installation instructions would not have been found on the first page you linked nor the second. What you will find on that getting started page is a verbose description of instillation media and instructions for creating it on various platforms. At the bottom there is the equivalent of the getting started card that might come with a game or anything else. Section 3 is titled "Using the USB Installer & Quickly Install OPNsense" and I ignored it because I was booting/installing from a CD. Section 4 is tips, again not an ordered description of the installation process. Only at the very bottom is there a link to the full online documentation. And only if you navigate to the installation page ( https://docs.opnsense.org/manual/install.html ) and don't immediately assume (as I did) that it's a clone of the getting started page simply because the first 80% of it is identical. Only if you scroll to the bottom will you find the installation instructions. (Maybe put installation media and installation processes on separate pages). So in all the time I had to Google in frustration, the only description of what I would come to find at the end was the thread I linked.



--- Quote from: franco on August 27, 2017, 08:55:17 am ---Yes, if your boot takes that long, which is probably a hardware issue. You could also try updating the BIOS, some people reported this is an issue with the UEFI boot compatibility.


Respectfully,
Franco

--- End quote ---

As an experiment I put the 17.7 LiveCD in my daily desktop machine which is a i7-4930K with 16GB of ram and an internal SATA2 optical drive. I did four boots and timed it just to the point where it prompts for a login.

1 internal SATA2 optical drive UEFI > 11:20
2 internal SATA2 optical drive bios > 13:40
3 external USB2 optical drive UEFI > 20:00
4 external USB2 optical drive bios > 19:30

So plainly optical is less than ideal even on a system that (I hope) is far beyond what most will experience installation on. The router I was working on (which I try to keep low power, hence no internal optical drive) is an Atom D525 with 4GB of ram and I was using the USB2 optical drive for installation. That's where I got a 45+ minute boot on good hardware. It runs OPNsense like a champ, no bottle necks on my 200Mbs cable connection. It just suffers more overhead on VPN tunnels without hardware AES support.

If my first experience with OPNsense had required sitting through a 45 minute boot just to get to the first typically-used-by-a-brand-new-user interactive menu I would never have sat through it. I would have hit the reset button and found an alternative. I did hit the reset button 30 minutes into my first attempt this time around so I could try option 1 on the boot menu instead of 0. I think that both of you assumed I had gone through the hassle of using a flash drive as the installation media. I did not. I burned the iso file to a genuine optical disk. I'm sure if I had put the installation material on a re-writable medium with sub-millisecond seek times the whole process would be a lot snappier.

Now, based on my zero minutes of experience as a software developer, here are several separate and individual options I might suggest to mitigate the chance of making a bad impression on an initial install:

1) Edit the download and getting started pages to plainly spell out that a flash drive is a radically superior option to optical media for this installation and explain in bold red print on the download page, on the getting started page, and the full online documentation, that boot times from optical media will be very long.
2) Put a boot menu on the CD giving an option to do a old fashioned install, avoiding a forced boot to a live environment.
3) Have the installer determine if it is running from an optical disc and if there is sufficient ram available, dump the installation data into memory and run everything from there.
4) Abandon support for optical installation media and require flash-storage based installation.

So take it or leave it. I still love using OPNsense, I hope that isn't lost. I'm just saying that if I didn't know it was good, I never would sit through the installation and there are many short fused people like me in the world. You'd be forgiven for not wanting more of us around; I understand.

bartjsmit:
I suspect that a very, if not most, common use case for the iso format is to boot a virtual instance. As most regulars on this forum, I do a lot of system builds, both for testing and for use in anger. I can safely say that this has not involved spinning polycarbonate for an extremely long time.

Your experience is certainly atypical, but I'm glad you came here rather than bin your install disk and move on  :)

Bart...

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