OPNsense not loading

[yogurt245]

Followed a YouTube tutorial on how to install OPNsense and it installed just fine on my dual lan minipc. Plugged it into my network to get the wizard going, and while it took a while to boot, I was able to get into the wizard. After navigating the wizard a bit, the network connection hung for a while then cut out. I unplugged everything and plugged the firewall into my monitor to see the logs and everything is loading correctly. Plugged it back into my network and nothing. I swapped WAN 0 and 1 around to see if that would make a difference, but nothing.

 

I did this same setup 2 years ago and it worked flawlessly.  What am I doing wrong?

[OhioYJ]

Basically all you need to do is install OPNsense. It should just work after that. (After you have the LAN and WAN interfaces figured out). Does your PC get assigned an IP? Can you ping the firewall? You are connected by a cable to the firewall?

[yogurt245]

12 hours ago, OhioYJ said:

Basically all you need to do is install OPNsense. It should just work after that. (After you have the LAN and WAN interfaces figured out). Does your PC get assigned an IP? Can you ping the firewall? You are connected by a cable to the firewall?

Apologies for the late reply. No, I am unable to ping the fire wall. Firewall is in-front of my modem, and behind my router. Plugging in a monitor, the terminal remains blank and nothing is shown up. I turned off the firewall and turned it back on, but now it's stuck on the bios boot logo. I'm thinking it the machine itself now.

[yogurt245]

Another thing I'm noticing, plugging in the drive, I'm unable to access the bios even when pressing the esc, f12 and delete keys. However when the drive is not connected, I can access the bios just fine.

[OhioYJ]

2 hours ago, yogurt245 said:

Firewall is in-front of my modem, and behind my router. 

What is the router for? Usually the firewall is the router. Or is your router just going to act as your AP essentially?

 

Usually in most BIOS you can turn off the image during boot, it might be handy here to see what is actually going on. You might see what it's getting stuck on. 

 

When you day drive is connected, you are actually removing the boot drive (a SSD I presume)? It does boot OPNsense from the USB and runs in the live mode correct?

[yogurt245]

19 minutes ago, OhioYJ said:

What is the router for? Usually the firewall is the router. Or is your router just going to act as your AP essentially?

 

Usually in most BIOS you can turn off the image during boot, it might be handy here to see what is actually going on. You might see what it's getting stuck on. 

 

When you day drive is connected, you are actually removing the boot drive (a SSD I presume)? It does boot OPNsense from the USB and runs in the live mode correct?

It's just acting as an AP. Yes, removing the boot drive (sata SSD), I can esc, f12, delete into the bios. I plugged the sata SSD into my PC via usb adapter to see what is going wrong, and it's not being recognized by Windows. 

 

Nothing in Disk managing for the drive is showing up. Going into CMD and typing "wmic logicaldisk get caption", nothing shows up except my already installed two SSD's. The activity light for the sata to USB adapter just blinks. I tried another sata SSD and that shows up fine.

 

So I'm guessing it's the drive itself that's bad. Going to use that good drive and see if it boots up.

[yogurt245]

So, I found an unused M.2 drive for my firewall. Installation went smoothly and I'm able to boot into the firewall. I'm able to load the GUI on 192.168.1.1 and see the logs, but for some reason it won't connect to the WAN. LAN on the console gets the default 192.168.1.1 IP, but WAN shows up as blank. Switching the cables around/reloading the system does nothing. I tried updating it through the GUI and this is what it said,

 

The release type "opnsense" is not available on this repository.

***GOT REQUEST TO CHECK FOR UPDATES***
Currently running OPNsense 25.1 (amd64) at Fri Mar 21 18:19:13 UTC 2025
Fetching changelog information, please wait... fetch: https://pkg.opnsense.org/FreeBSD:14:amd64/25.1/sets/changelog.txz: Host does not resolve
Updating OPNsense repository catalogue...
Waiting for another process to update repository OPNsense
All repositories are up to date.
pkg: Repository OPNsense cannot be opened. 'pkg update' required
Checking integrity... done (0 conflicting)
Your packages are up to date.
pkg: Repository OPNsense missing. 'pkg update' required
self: No packages available to install matching 'opnsense'
***DONE***

I noticed the WAN was in IPV6 mode, so I changed it back to IPV4. Still, no internet connection. Aside from that, all settings are factory default..