external config.xml import on boot

[fichtner]

FAT32 / one partition (standard Windows layout), always automatically import from install media in this case (and on factory reset).

via: https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=4394.0

[EugenMayer]

That would be actually pretty neat, also during the installer

[fichtner]

First step done. Extracted importer code from the installer as a shell script: https://github.com/opnsense/core/blob/974ff9420d99e641f419021f6aa61a4426537d3d/src/etc/rc.importer

[EugenMayer]

@fichtner those are cool news, very handy for the cloud appliances GCE/AWS whatsoever, or provisioning with packer

[mircsicz]

@fichtner THX for adding it to the Milestone

And as a cross reference: Forum-Thread

[EugenMayer]

its seems like this is not working for me at least. Are there any docs?

Using a MBR or GPT absed MSDOS usb drive with either config-hostname...xml or config.xml right under root but i get "no prevision configuration was found on device"

(did not yet open a new issue since i am not sure i am just missing the docs, and i guess since this is number one on google, an answer on docs here would be cool)

[fichtner]

it's /conf/config.xml -- opnsense-importer expects a "real system" layout

[fichtner]

245401492 added it to the manual page and the import error message for clarity

[EugenMayer]

@fichtner great, thank you! Shouldn't we also add it to https://docs.opnsense.org/manual/install.html since that is what i was actually using to find out (since opnsense-importer --help did not work) .. out of any reason i did not pick man.

Maybe its reasonable to you

[fichtner]

Is this a 18.7 image import? I'm getting:

opnsense-importer --help
opnsense-importer: illegal option -- -
Usage: man opnsense-importer

Eventually it should be added to the docs page as well, but may require a bit of effort to split the page... pretty big already so easy to miss this even if on the page.

[EugenMayer]

I was on 18.7.0 ( image version ) but i am not sure what was displayed actually. Since i upgraded to 18.7.7 before reading that, i cannot actually retry, sorry

Overall the process was a bit clunky in terms that the version you get from the installer is 18.7.0 but my box i am migrating from is obviously the latest patch version (18.7.7).

To get my box online, i have to import the config first - if i do so, aliases and more are not imported since it is actually not supported in 18.7.0 (format change in 18.7.0+) and things are fairly broken, since the whole firewall does not work now.

I would suggest, but this is for an different issue / discussion, to refresh the installer image everytime your patch-release is more then a patch release and is incompatible with the configuration from the lower versions. This ensure disaster recovery actually works, since in most cases, we will install from the iso right .. kind of hen/egg otherwise

[fichtner]

Fair point. Alias transition was planned for 18.7.0 so that would have aligned with image... I'll try to release 18.7.8 images after that's out... planned for tomorrow so images could follow next week. Will check internally if that makes sense, but it should. :)