Security
pfSense installation continued, part 2 of 3
Tags:  pfSense, security,  first published on Jan 1, 2016

In the previous step of this tutorial we set up the pfSense VM in virtualbox, let’s now start it up and actually install pfSense. Allow the boot to continue until you get to the VLAN prompt we do not need to set up VLANs for our usage, so press ‘n’ and continue,

from now on unless specified these will be text-mode console pfSense screens, this is the beginning of the first boot, the prompt mentioned is 'Do you want to set up VLANs now [y|n]'

then you just have to enter all the NICs we have until there are no more and press enter with an empty line

after pressing n there will be various prompts where one configures the connected interfaces, all of the prompts are of the 'Enter the XX interface name or a for auto-detection' variety, WAN has to be set to vtnet0, LAN to vtnet1

continuing with the interfaces, optional 1 to vtnet2, 2 to vtnet3 and so on until you reach optional 14 to vtnet15, having finished simply press enter

you will now get a recap screen with the assignments that were specified

recap screen with the previous assignments, WAN to vtnet0, LAN to vtnet1 OPT1 to vtnet2 and so on until OPT14 to vtnet15, with a proceed y/n prompt

which can be accepted by pressing ‘y’, afterwards we can move to the actual HD installation

the pfSense main text menu, type 99 to select the pfSense installation option

in the pfSense installation, configure console screen, select accept these settings with everything set to default

in the pfSense installation, select task screen, select quick / easy install

in the pfSense installation, are you sure confirmation, select ok

in the pfSense installation, install kernel screen, select standard kernel

in the pfSense installation, reboot screen, select reboot

Note depending on the memory and disk size you pick you might get a warning that your swap partition is not big enough to contain the memory in case of a crash, up to you if you want to customize the partition layout or ignore the warning.

You can now reboot (don’t forget to take the CD image out of the virtual drive) and you will be at the pfSense prompt. At this point I usually remove the ‘F1 boot prompt’ to speed up the boot process, to do this follow the steps listed in the official pfSense documentation here 1 which will be the following screens

custom pfSense removal of the boot prompt, at the pfSense menu select option 8 and enter sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16 then fdisk -B ada0

custom pfSense removal of the boot prompt, after the fdisk command will get do you want to change the boot code, enter y

custom pfSense removal of the boot prompt, second and final warning, select y

and reboot the VM. pfSense is now installed, but before we can configure it via the GUI we have to set up the IP address of the LAN interface, the one that is connected to our TUN device. At the boot select option 2, set interfaces IP address

back to the pfSense console, select option 2, then 2 again to configure the LAN interface, at the various prompts select 172.31.1.1 for the LAN ipv4 address, 24 for the subnet, an empty gateway and empty ipv6 address, select n to not enable dhcp on this interface

after the previous input pfSense will print some status messages following by a you can now access the webConfigurator by opening https://172.31.1.1/

we do not configure dhcp on our LAN interface as we’ll only ever have our Dom0 connecting there, where we have already set up 172.31.1.2 as the static ip address in the systemd unit section in the previous configuration step.

After setting up the IP address, we can now continue the configuration via the provided GUI. in the next part of this tutorial.

  1. https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Remove_F1_Boot_Prompt ↩
Changelog:
  • Initial release - 2016-01-01