pfSense: restore broken config

Table of Contents

My pfSense firewall at home got a pretty heavy misconfiguration by myself and that resulted in an annoying boot-loop. This took me quite a while to research, but I finally got it working again. Thank god pfSense makes backups of its configuration so this recovery process works quite well.

Follow these steps #

Boot into single user mode
Connect to your firewall (with a serial console) and choose option 5) Reboot system and confirm with the letter S (capital s).
ZFS version only
1. Remount root slice as read-write:
```
$ /sbin/mount -u /
```
2. Mount all ZFS filesystems, datasets etc.
```
$ /sbin/zfs mount -a
```
3. Working within the mounted filesystems
  1. Enter /cf/conf
```
$ cd /cf/conf
```
  2. Copy the newest backup file back
```
$ cp backup/config-1648889613.xml config.xml
```
  3. Clear the config cache
```
$ rm /tmp/config.cache
```
  4. Reload system and it’s services
```
$ /etc/rc.reload_all start
```
    This may take a while. At this point we are done, we can now remove the single user mode boot configuration and reboot the firewall.
4. Clear the single user mode boot configuration
```
$ /sbin/nextboot -D
```
  ZFS does not clear the single user mode boot configuration by itself, that’s why we have to delete it after we are done with our work.
5. Reboot the system
```
$ /sbin/reboot
```
  You could also use exit, but that would only continue booting into multi user mode without rebooting the system first. I personally think that we would benefit from a full reboot.

Okay, that’s it all for now. Please note that I do not use the UFS filesystem any more, so I won’t add this to my little instruction set.

This post was actually older, I’ve saved the instructions in a textfile until I found the time to format it and publish it on my website.

Follow these steps #

Sources #