Unflappings

Recently pfSense 2.0 was released into beta stages, and as an avid 1.2.x line user, I was eager to check it out. I did still want the ability to rollback to a previous version if things were too unstable, so I configured dual booting the stable 1.2.x line with the experimental 2.0 build. Note this should also work for any other versions in the future, but these two are just used as an example.

• Back up current configuration of stable system. Make sure you have the config.xml file handy to upload since you will actually need to re-install the system if you do not already have correctly sized slices.
• Boot stable pfSense media. It actually does not matter which is used, but for the sake of example stable comes first.
• Select to (i) install to the local hard disk.
• Select < Custom Install > as shown below after configuring keyboard and display.

• Next select the hard disk you would like to use to install the system. You may install over several drives if you wish using the same general idea, the only difference is where you place partitions. I am using a single drive setup here for simplicity and commonality.

• Select to format this disk as you would a normal install.

• I suggest using the default disk geometry for the next part, unless you are a FreeBSD and storage guru this should be left well alone.
• Go ahead and select the Format daO (or whatever your harddisk is named) next to complete the formatting process.

• Now comes the partitioning, which is the most important part of this process. This involves configuring ’slices’ for the operating systems. The numbers used here are totally dependent on the disk you are using, but try to allocate a sane amount of storage to your pfSense install. Most installs wont need more than 1GB of disk space and depending on how much swap space you need, it could be substantially less. If you have a large disk, feel free to carve out a couple of slices  for future installs or testing.

• I have simply created a 1GB portion for install and left the rest for something else. The active partition is set on this first drive.

• If you get the following warning, no need to worry, it just needs to expand/shrink in order to be on a boundary. This is required and up to you how you want to modify.

• After partitioning, install boot blocks on this device with the default settings. Note that I have selected packet mode due to some of my disk preferences.

• Finally select the slice you wish to install this version of pfSense on. From my example this will be the top selection, and installation and configuration should be normal from there.

• Now we need to install the alternate boot of pfSense, so load the installation media and reboot your system. Most of this install is the same and I will only highlight the differences seen from the base install.
• Configure keyboard and video settings, proceed, and select the disk you would like to install the second version to.
• The first important change is actually just skipping some of the steps done in the first one, and skipping formatting is definitely the first thing we want to do.

• The next thing you don’t want to do is partition the disk. You can skip this step as well since we have already set up partitions in the original install. If you did create a giant slice at the end of the disk to begin with and would like to further slice that out for this one and potentially more, than you can partition the disk at this stage.

• Now you definitely want to skip installing boot blocks. You have already done this and no need to do it again.

• Now you get to select the slice that you would like to install the next version, as I have done here with the bottom half of my disk.

• From there the installation proceeds as usual with whatever options you need. Reboot the system after installation and you will get a menu that shows pressing F1 FreeBSD and F2 FreeBSD. This refers to the order of installation on the disk. So the first pfSense you installed on the ‘top’ slice of the disk will be F1 and the second will be F2 on boot to mark that as active.

FreeBSD makes it relatively simple to dual boot this OS, and with a bit of extra work you can afford yourself extra flexibility later on for testing.