I have a problem with restoring a config file into a newly-rebuilt machine (Alix 2d3) with v1.2.3, that causes the GUI to regularly complain "XML error: no pfsense object found!" and in general to require a full reboot before any GUI changes can be applied, even though /cf/conf/config.xml is correctly changed.
Full description: At one site I have a PC Engines Alix 2D3 machine, running a full install of pfSense 1.2.3 on a 1GB CF card. We have 3 physical interfaces and a wireless card acting as an AP. Recently the machine was rebooted, and failed to come up properly. Investigation showed that /usr/sbin was completely missing (also /usr/X11R6 and /usr/share). It's possible that filesystem corruption had caused this, but by the time I got to it, the fs was clean and fsck found nothing unusual. We have a backup of the config, produced by grabbing the output from diag_backup.php every day. I used VirtualBox (PUEL 4.08 on Ubuntu 10.10 64) to install a new copy of pfSense onto a new CF card, booting from the 1.2.3 LiveCD and connecting the CF card to VBox with a passthrough vmdk file. Although there were a lot of odd issues whereby most of the CF cards I had available simply did not work when accessed with FreeBSD (throwing read and write errors constantly; but working just fine when accessed by other OSs) the original CF card and one new one seemed to work perfectly. I booted up the Alix 2d3 with the new clean pfSense 1.2.3, assigned a PC into 192.168.1/24, and logged in to the web GUI. I then used the restore page to re-present the old config file we had. After reboot, everything looked good - the right IPs and interfaces were assigned, the AP started up normally. After we put the machine back into service, and confirmed access was fine, it was time to make a few changes to things like aliases. This is where the current problem lies ... As an example, I have an alias that needed updating; one IP address needed to be added. Going to Firewall/Aliases displayed the current list of aliases correctly; selecting "[e]" took me to the correct Edit screen. I made my change, and selected "Save". The response I get was a blank page with the error message "XML error: no pfsense object found!" > http://10.23.1.2/firewall_aliases_edit.php says > <html><head></head><body>XML error: no pfsense object found! > </body></html> When I cleaned the URL to get back to the main page, and re-selected Firewall/Aliases, I saw the "Apply Changes" button -- but clicking through to the edit page showed the old content, not my changes. Pressing "Apply Changes" seemed to work, and the filter reload reported no problems. Returning to Firewall/Aliases/Edit showed the old values. At this point, the /cf/conf/config.xml file contained the correct changes, but the GUI didn't reflect them, and when I downloaded the configuration from the GUI, I got the old values. Next, I rebooted the firewall, and discovered that the new config was correctly applied. I have tried to repeat this in a VirtualBox VM, but it does not fail -- applying the old configuration simply leads to the machine starting up happily with the new configuration (just complaining about the interface mismatches ... the real hardware has vr[012]|ath0 and the virtual machine has em[0123] instead). Edit to the new configuration are accepted without error, and apply properly. I cannot do very much experimentation with the machine as it is currently in production use, but I need to find a way to fix the problem of making changes. I would appreciate advice on further debugging, and on ways to restore normal function to this machine :-) If I had spare working CF cards, I would consider repeating all this and upgrading to 2.0RC1. -jim --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] Commercial support available - https://portal.pfsense.org
