Auto rebuild of PFsense

Im going to be away for 2 weeks and would like to be able to leave a USB stick for my room mates in the case of any issues.

ive looked in to unattended PFsense installs with the config being taken in, if thats even possible from just a usb it seems like ill have to figure out a lot more.

at this point i think it would be easier to image my install to a .img and find a way to have a USB with the .img on board auto boot and write the .img to disk.

if nothing else ill leave a USB with a live copy of my PFsense. but i would love this plug in, turn on (10 mins), reboot option because its awesome.

EDIT: maybe a copy of knoppix that has a start up set to do this.

I’m trying to figure out what you are attempting to accomplish here.

Are you concerned that your PFSense drive media might die while you are away and you want a one click solution for your room mates to be able to re-image the router and have it restore configs automatically?

My guess is if the drive is that bad, a re-image won’t be useful either…

Might be easier to just have a backup system/router on hand they could just physically swap out? I assume they aren’t very technically minded?

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YES!!

the drive is fine, ill be moving to a small zotec box for that time and it has a fairly new SSD in it

EDIT: i was thinking about ordering a small router in the case of failure. dont really want to do that… id cut my self off of homelab if switched to router

EDIT-2: the issue at hand is that my room will be locked and if any reboots are needed they would be struck, we have brownouts and power losses in the area. the area that i am moving all of the network equipment to will not have a battery backup. worst case ill just have a USB with the live copy of my current config

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In my expirence, drive failures in pfSense is rare, but the config backup is quite powerful.

Story time:
My UPS failed recently and we suffered a power outage. Since the VGA console is borked in pfSense for the resolution of my KVM setup, I use an old fashioned terminal hooked up to the serial port. I was away and my wife was asking how to fix the network. I walked her through over the phone to follow the menu prompts to reboot the router (easiest way to re-establish DHCP from ISP). She accidentally selected the option to wipe all settings because during the power blip the numbers no longer matched up to the options for some reason (and they’re next to each other). Anyway, it required me to connect my laptop with a backup config to restore everything. I did not have a work around but config restore is robust and everything is back like nothing even happened now.

In hindsight, it would have been easier to just tell her to hit the reset switch and hard reboot…

Maybe you could provide an extension cord with a power switch on it so your room mates can reboot it that way? :smile:

a little after posting i thought to put my raid in read only and tell them to just go flip the breaker lol