@gertjan

Thanks for all that. I do make it a point to watch several tuts and read discussion groups about things before plunging in. I got it all set up and working, now I'm trying to learn to tweak it by assigning an IP address.

pfSense is running smoothly now, haven't had any problems in the last day or two. Thanks for everyone's help!!

@balanga Dont. 2.4.5p1 is the last stable release

ok, put in new NIC card and all is well.

@gertjan Yes but no problem with fresh install. Very strange !

Further to this issue, FYI the same problem did not present again, when later upgrading from pfSense v2.5.0 to the quickly following update v2.5.1, instead successfully progressing and completing without incident and all appears to be working without issue after update completion.

@kom I do, thank you!!!

@tobyswe

Go to https://www.netgate.com/support/contact-support.html , click on the pro link https://go.netgate.com/ and login and or create an account.. I bought my unit used, created a ticket and got the OS image.. They were great with a newbie!

@steveits thank you for the prompt reply. I have done it before but complete forgot how to request an image. I did the upgrade on 5 and 3 went smoothly. The two that had problems were stuck in upgrade for about 2 hours on one abs the other about 90 mins before I decided to manually intervene.

Overall I guess some bugs are to be expected but mostly I am happy with Netgate hardware.

Thanks again

This looks like a bug yes. Check: https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/11805#change-53054

And the following forum post: https://forum.netgate.com/topic/162924/to-2-5-1-or-not-that-is-the-question/65?_=1618838285034

The upgrade process is an "online' activity.

How can you download an upgrade if there are no interfaces == no network ?

@brians Same issue here:

https://forum.netgate.com/topic/162924/to-2-5-1-or-not-that-is-the-question/65?_=1618564501919

You can install 2.5.1 and import your config from 2.5.0, but a update should not mess with the boot device in the first place.

@virgiliomi Same problem for me but on 21.02.2 (SG-1100)
Although DNS seems to be working since the ntp log shows the server IP.
I'm using 2 pools - us.pool.ntp.org & time.cloudflare.com

Apr 15 14:35:53 ntpd 96301 Soliciting pool server 74.6.168.72 Apr 15 14:34:52 ntpd 96301 Soliciting pool server 2606:4700:f1::1 Apr 15 14:34:49 ntpd 96301 Soliciting pool server 162.159.200.1

It looks like it is also trying to try IPv6 occasionally even though I tried forcing IPv4 in NTP settings.

@trumee SHA256 (pfSense-CE-memstick-2.4.5-RELEASE-p1-amd64.img.gz) = aa40595d090465f20fff1890092e6a14a753cd9486ccc7101d81301cad8b8840

This file content was downloaded from netgate when this version was still available.

Okay, I instead updated to the deprecated 2.4.5-RELEASE-p1, and that went fine. I then updated from that to 21.02_1, which also went fine.

Problem solved. Sorry for the noise.

@jimp In case it's helpful or necessary, here is the ipsec portion of my config file. (Don't have any actual ipsec tunnels configured.)

<ipsec> <phase1>i</phase1> <logging> <dmn>1</dmn> <mgr>1</mgr> <ike>1</ike> <chd>1</chd> <job>1</job> <cfg>1</cfg> <knl>1</knl> <net>1</net> <asn>1</asn> <enc>1</enc> <imc>1</imc> <imv>1</imv> <pts>1</pts> <tls>1</tls> <esp>1</esp> <lib>1</lib> </logging> </ipsec>

If you contact support at https://go.netgate.com they can look up your info in other ways and get you the installation image for Plus on your Netgate hardware.