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

[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.

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/

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.

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

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...

[franco]

Out of curiosity, does this also happen when using a i386 DVD image?

[jjduru]

[...]
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.

No, no, no. Let's get something straight. You're not short fused and definitely your experience with the install on disk process is not singular.

I mean heck, first time when I installed it, having the pfsense work flow in mind, it took me a while to understand why the f. my settings are not preserved after rebooting the opnsense firewall. Just to realize I kept running in a live cd environment.

This needs to change asap, it's poor programming.

[franco]

Or one could read the documentation.

https://docs.opnsense.org/manual/install.html?highlight=installer#installation-media

Look, if you want to make an impact on this project, don't start your first post with a rant about something that we have had for almost a year now and properly documented.

It's the sum of what people wanted and asked for, not the effort on the dev side to screw with anyone personally. Don't take it that way. We won't, because otherwise we should just stop bothering to try to please lost, current and future users of OPNsense.


Cheers,
Franco

[franco]

The two main reason why the installer was moved to the end of the boot sequence:

* Allow SSH remote installation
* Improper display of the installer on a serial console

I'm happy for both of these changes.


Cheers,
Franco

[ChrisH]

Okay, but maybe you could have a prompt during first boot that allows you to invoke the installer instead of booting to the live CD? I know it's documented (and I personally did not have any problems with the installation), but especially coming from pfSense people are just used to a different workflow.

[franco]

But how do we solve the installer display being garbled over serial console?

FWIW, you can hit CTRL-C a few times, log in as "root" (no password at this point) and type:

# ifconfig lo0 127.0.0.1/8
# ifconfig lo0 up
# opnsense-installer

At one point the loopback setup was part of that installer. That can be restored *and* we could make the early config importer drop to a shell (or the installer) of you want. That's how OpenBSD allows for customisation every step of the way.

But that still won't fix the serial display of the installer.


Cheers,
Franco

[ChrisH]

People using serial consoles are more likely to read the documentation beforehand
Everybody else just has to press "i" (or whatever) at the right moment to invoke the installer immediately.

[franco]

No, we'll make any sensible change forward, but none backwards.

[ChrisH]

Fair enough. I don't care much either way, I was just suggesting options.

[franco]

For 18.7: https://github.com/opnsense/core/commit/b123c3a1

If one breaks to the early importer on an install media boot and issues "!", the resulting shell will be able to run "opnsense-installer" now, which was expanded to support an early invoke of itself.

Nobody wrote a single line of code since the writing of this post. It gives an idea of how this should be prioritised, documented and hidden away to be reserved for advanced use only.


Cheers,
Franco