I'm just a home user, so this is probably silly. But, for the second time, I tried updating my Protectli VP2410 from pfSense 23.09.1 to 24.03_1 and had no internet afterwards and could not access the GUI. By thrashing around, I've gotten it (apparently) working again. But, I'd like to figure out what I did wrong.
This time around, I removed the one package I use (pfBlockerNG), rebooted pfSense and had it do the update from System > Update > System Update. Glancing through all the verbiage that scrolled by during the update, things looked mostly ok. There were several certificates it skipped as untrusted (I don't understand what that's about, so I'll attach that material), but it appeared to finish correctly and rebooted. When it came up, I had no internet and could not access the GUI. I'm on WiFi and have two separate WiFi routers and even though both were being seen, neither had internet.
I connected a laptop to the VP2410 via the console and everything looked fine there. I used Option 5 to reboot the system, but it made no difference. I finally used Option 15 to restore the automatic configuration the system made prior to updating (for some reason, the manual Boot Environment I made just prior wasn't there -- but maybe I'm confusing two different things). I rebooted pfSense again and when it came back, I had internet access and could access the GUI. Surprisingly, the system is still on 24.03 (no _1 in the GUI, but the console says something about Patch 1, so I assume that's normal). I re-installed pfBlocker and all seems fine.
The previous time I'd tried updating to 24.03 (and failed), I could at least access the GUI and restore the previous Boot Environment from there. But, in the hope of finding out what happened (and reporting this if it's a valid issue), I thought I'd report it here.
23_09_1 to 24_03_1.txt