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Scenario¶

- I updated from 2.3 => 2.4 (FreeBSD 11) and it went badly
- I wanted to recover my config.xml (I know I should have backed up first)
- I downloaded the 2.4 memstick installer and booted off that
- The installer gave me a lovely option (!!) to recover my config.xml from existing install
- This worked great, so I now have the file on one of the ramdisks (the installer USB is read only...could it be re-mounted read/write? I didn't try that)

How to get the config.xml off the FW box? I have serial console access only. No network. I fiddled around with getting it to recognise a second USB stick (formatted as UFS etc), lots of problems. I also tried capturing serial console output and "cat'ing" the file..but this resulted in a corrupted file.

Request¶

If the installer image recovery root prompt had access to kermit: http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/ckututor.html
or something similar, it would have been trivial to:

- connect to FW box via kermit running on laptop
- boot the installer image
- do the lovely config.xml recovery
- run kermit on the FW box (...REQUIRES kermit to be part of the installer image...!)
- use kermit "send" command to send the file back to my laptop over the serial console.
- proceed with install, get basic operation working, and then use webconfigurator or scp/ssh to re-install the recovered config.xml

- might also be nice to have kermit as one of the INSTALLED packages (or at least have it available from the pfsense package respository)

How I solved it¶

- In the end I managed to get hold of my config.xml, by booting into the semi-broken 2.3 install and saving it to USB from there (USB seemed less problematic when fully booted, rather than from installer image recovery console which has "less stuff")
- once the box was fully restored, I tried the kermit idea. I installed kermit with "pkg add ...fbsd_repo_url".. and .. it works like a charm! I had the recovered config.xml back on my laptop in minutes.

Happy to write an article on how to use Kermit for these sorts of operations (the man page is pretty scary!)