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Code and Hacks

Locked myself out of pfSense

Posted by Admin • Saturday, September 26. 2009 • Category: Code and Hacks

I was experimenting a bit with pfSense 1.2.3rc1 as a replacement for a WRT54G router today.


So I set did the following, among many things:

  1. Switched web configurator to SSL (443)
  2. Turned on reflection (applies NAT port forwarding rules to local LAN)
  3. Set up NAT port forwarding, which includes port 443 to one of my servers (which isn't up at the moment)



Guess what? Can't access webconfigurator.... an hour of being very confused later... I get it. All my SSL requests for webconfigurator are now being sent to the nonexistent internal NAT-ed server! I can't get back in, and reboots don't help!

Fixing this is not too hard. Log in (SSH or console) and edit /conf/config.xml

<webgui>
    <protocol>https</protocol>


Now just change to http. (If you're not running off hard drive, you may need to save directly to your floppy.) Obviously changing this will prevent you from using reflection from a NAT-ed server on port 80 now :-)



NOTE: you may need to "rm /tmp/config.cache" to clear out config cache, and restart web configurator from the menu.

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