General Questions

Hi,

my Soekris appliance crashed today and i need to get a new one. So far so easy. But i dont have a recent XML backup of the m0n0wall config. Now i am not sure if i can get a binary compatible soekris board and wonder if i can grab the config from the CF card in an easy way (possibly without booting my old CF Card because perhaps i cant even boot from it because of different soekris hardware).

So is this possible? This way i would be sure that i can re-use the config, even while using another CF card by just copy/paste it from old to new CF card.... Thanks for any info. My config was quite big including site2site VPN tunnels and ugly things like that.

Thanks for infos.

Marc

Yes, it is possible to recover the config.xml file from the CF card.

I did it just now using the following method:

I put the CF card into the CF card slot on my Epson Printer, USB connected to a Windows XP machine. I also have other CF card hardware, but the printer was easiest for me.

Using a program called UFS Explorer, I opened the CF card drive and copied the config.xml file (located in /conf) from the CF card to my Windows machine.

You can find UFS Explorer here http://www.ufsexplorer.com/index.php?ref=app

I am not sure if the program works as a trial, or must be purchased.

If you can't accomplish this yourself and can provide me an iso image of the CF card I can read it and extract the config.xml file and return it to you.

Thanks a lot for your answer. This gives me some peace for the coming day. When i get my new hardware tomorrow (two soekris boards with seperate power suplies in one 19" rack - i dont want to get in that situation ever again) i will check if my existing m0n0wall CF card runs out of the box. If not i might come back to you regarding the process (no windows pc at hand). Thanks for your offer. Of course i hope that i can just plug in my old CF into the new hardware and everything is fine ;-)

Marc

I'd say chances are very good the CF card will just work. I base this on not seeing this type of question in this forum before.

just realized that my old router had a VIA cpu based board where i used the generic-pc image. So i definitely will change the hardware, which most likely mean that i need to recover right? Will come back with that as soon as i have the new hardware. Why of why is my latest config backup 1 year old. damn.

Marc

Well, I think you may still get lucky and it will boot. Probably the worst that will happen is that the network interfaces defined in the existing configuration will be wrong and you will have to redefine them from the console.

Do you have any access to a FreeBSD machine and a CF card reader?

Another way is to run a virtual machine line VirtualBox on whatever hardware/OS you have and install a copy of FreeBSD in it and then read the CF card.

But if sending me an iso image of the CF card sounds easier, let me know.