Summer is usually a bad thing for my hardware and projects. Once I've gone through all the trouble of getting them setup and working the way I like I get bored and wonder what else I could do to//with[] them.
My next project for my server[] was to install pfSense[]. I wasted most of my time on this project trying to do it the ways that were either not recommended or not documented.
Things like using unetbootin[] to run the LiveCD[] image since I have this strange hatred for optical media, it seems too wasteful to me, not to mention I rarely have the specific kind of media I need for the right project. That failed miserably of course since FreeBSD based LiveCD's never seem to like the extraction and customization process unetbootin does to linux based iso's.
After trying and failing to run the LiveCD from a thumb drive I did what I usually do to install OS's that require optical media for installation: I use my IDE-USB adapter[] to chain it to the USB KVM[] I use so I don't have to take my optical drive out to do installs. Lo and behold pfSense just happens to not support USB optical drives, it boots to the point where it would normally mount the iso9660[] formatted volume it expects to be at /dev/acd0 which isn't because FreeBSD 7.0 doesn't seem to have support for USB optical drives.
Anyway next in line was to use the embedded image. If you didn't already know the main storage for my server is a SYBA SD-CF-2IDE-U adapter[] or simpler: a Compact Flash to IDE adapter. I figured this would be simple enough as I used to do the same thing for running FreeNAS on my server. I'd just pop the CF card into the multi-reader on my desktop and use dd[] to dump the embedded image that pfSense provides to it. My first instinct after getting the image downloaded was to decompress it since it was packaged as a GNU Zip file. Booting from this produced only a pipe character with a blinking cursor immediately beneath it. Reading through instructions further I discovered that the embedded version doesn't have keyboard or video support, only serial which I don't have on any of my systems anymore never mind that for once I have the proper cable for that. Also apparently I'm supposed to dump the compressed image to the card which produces no pipe character at all let alone a bootable card.
Clearly I was off to a good start[]. I finally gave up on the whole idea of doing it any other way than what was tried and true. This lead to me dismantling my desktop to use the only working optical drive I've got left and plug it into my server to install from the LiveCD. Also took me a good long time to find the manual for the IDE-CF adapter to figure out which jumper[] needed to be changed so it would act as a slave. Once that was all said and done and the system booted to the LiveCD I ran the install to harddisk option. After formatting the disk, partitioning it and setting up appropriate slices it started the install. I wasn't done yet with my troubles since it decided it was going to hang at 43%. Upon further investigation I noticed the light on the optical drive I was using wasn't on or indicating any accessing at all. Found out that power had somehow disappeared from the drive, either through mechanical error[] or something else entirely. Rebooted and restarted the install once more, ended up disconnecting power and reconnecting it whilst installing. That seemed to do the trick as the install finished without further hitch excluding the fact that it wouldn't install GRUB citing an error return code of 1 so ditched that idea and just used their default setting.
You'd think I would have been done with installing and general mucking about at the low-level end of this whole thing and you'd be wrong. After putting the optical drive back in my desktop and rebooting the server I notice it did the same thing it did when I tried to boot it from the optical drive plugged in through USB, it couldn't find//mount the volume it thought the system was on. This is due to the CF adapter being a slave during the install and a master during boot after removing the optical drive. Instead of mucking around with the KVM switch and switching monitor display ports anymore[] I popped the CF card out of my server and into the CF port on the multi-reader in my desktop. Instead of using the USB filtering that VirtualBox has since it rarely ever works//tends to break anything I touch with it, I fired up a command prompt and created a vmdk that points to the physical disk. Mind you the command prompt must be run as administrator if you're doing this in Windows 7 like I am. It will fail with a VERR_ACCESS_DENIED exception if you don't.
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| VBoxManage.exe internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename CF.vmdk -rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDrive3 |
After creating CF.vmdk I made a new virtual machine for it to go into along with mounting the pfSense LiveCD. Starting a command prompt with option 8 I mounted /dev/ad0s1a to /mnt and edited /mnt/etc/fstab to change ad1s1a and ad0s1b to ad0s1a and ad0s1b respectively.
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| mount ufs:/dev/ad0s1a /mnt
vI /mnt/etc/fstab |
Reboot and it is finished! After all that is simple web-interface based configuration that didn't take very much time at all. Actually as I write this I am posting it through my new pfSense router.
One of the only things that kept me from installing Windows 7 permanently during the school year was that the few times I tried, I had never gotten MikTeX[] to work. This of course was a major problem since nearly all of my assignments are done with MikTeX now. When installing MikTeX I always ran into a BSOD that I ignored because I figured that it was only because Windows 7 was only an RC[].
I've had Windows 7 on my desktop now for about 2 weeks and up until this point I've been making due with the MikTeX Portable Edition which is pretty buggy to say the least. More than half of the time it would hang on compiling a document to pdf at something due to it not thinking initexmf.exe was an operable program. And of course upon googling this problem, nothing of use could be found.
Well tonight I decided I'd give the install another go to see if either Windows 7 had been patched to fix this issue, or if MikTeX had fixed the problem. On my first try, it did exactly as it had always done before BSOD'd. Since I had never set windows to not automatically restart upon catastrophic system failure[] it would just instantly restart without giving me enough time to read the type of error. I fixed this and ran the installer once more. The BSOD was a PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGED_AREA error, which was pretty vague as usual but I figured it had to do with system paging, so I disabled the Virtual Memory restarted and ran the installer once more. This time it worked exactly as it should.
On another interesting note, I discovered that pdflatex is significantly faster than texify. I found this out when I was trying different methods of compiling my TeX documents into pdf's using the MikTeX Portable Edition which was giving me fits with my old method.
I used to use the following in NotePad++'s NppExec plugin to compile a pdf and view in Adobe Reader:
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| C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.7\miktex\bin\texify.exe -c -p "$(FULL_CURRENT_PATH)" "$(NAME_PART).pdf"
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader\AcroRd32.exe "$(CURRENT_DIRECTORY)\$(NAME_PART).pdf" |
Now I use pdflatex:
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| C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.7\miktex\bin\pdflatex.exe "$(FULL_CURRENT_PATH)"
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader\AcroRd32.exe "$(CURRENT_DIRECTORY)\$(NAME_PART).pdf" |
I'm kind of pathetic, I still have access to my workstation even when I'm on vacation and I needed to do a little bit of work while I was here. So I fired up Logmein only to discover it didn't like any of the credentials I had tried to give it.
A quick google later and I found that Windows 7 RC requires the computer's name be prefixed as the domain of the login credentials like so:
Lets suppose your username is bob and your computer's name is bobs-computer. In order to login you would have to use bobs-computer\bob in for the username field then simply bob's password for that username.
So I did manage to remote into my workstation to do some work and all is well.
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