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Install from the ISO

The installer ISO puts gate42 on VMware, Hyper-V, VirtualBox or a physical machine.

The installer ISO comes with the next gate42 release. Until then, use the cloud image on host42, OpenStack, Proxmox VE or KVM.

What you need

  • Two network cards. On the first boot gate42 makes NIC 1 the WAN and NIC 2 the LAN (192.168.1.1). To choose others, use option 1 of the console menu.
  • 2 CPU cores, 4 GB of RAM and 20 GB of disk or more. The installer warns below 3 GB of RAM.
  • UEFI without Secure Boot, or BIOS. gate42's FreeBSD boot loader is not signed for Secure Boot.

Install

  1. Start the machine from the ISO.
  2. After a minute or two the console shows the installer's password:

text gate42 installer: log in as installer to install gate42 on this machine, or as root to try it without installing. The password for both: xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx

  1. Log in as installer with that password. (As root you can try gate42 without installing it; nothing is kept when the machine restarts.)
  2. In the installer, choose a keymap, then Install (ZFS), stripe for a single disk, and the disk. The disk is erased. Copying takes a few minutes.
  3. Under Root Password, set the root password of your new firewall, then choose Complete Install and Reboot. Remove the ISO.
  4. Log in at https://<WAN address>:8443, or https://192.168.1.1:8443 from the LAN, as root with the password you set (first login).

Platform notes

We test every ISO on KVM: BIOS with virtio disks and NICs, and UEFI with a SATA disk and Intel e1000 NICs, the hardware VMware and VirtualBox present by default. Other platforms follow FreeBSD 15's support; tell us what you find.

Platform Settings
VMware ESXi, Workstation Guest OS "FreeBSD 14 or later (64-bit)"; network adapters VMXNET 3 or E1000; a SATA or LSI Logic SAS disk; EFI without Secure Boot, or BIOS
Hyper-V Generation 2 with Secure Boot off (or Generation 1); network adapters, not legacy ones
VirtualBox Type BSD, version FreeBSD (64-bit); Intel PRO/1000 adapters; a SATA disk
Physical machines Mount the ISO through the server's remote console (iDRAC, iLO, IPMI), or burn it to a DVD. A USB stick image follows later.

MTU: gate42's WAN uses the MTU its DHCP server offers; most routers offer none, and then nothing changes. If your provider's DHCP offers a wrong MTU (dropped connections, pages that stall), tick Override MTU under Interfaces › WAN to ignore it, as OPNsense does by default.

Padmini installs gate42 for you on any of these: our services.