Netgate 4100 - 23.01 upgrade experience

[52buickman]

I successfully upgraded to 23.01 today. This was my first time upgrading a major version. I thought I'd share the bumps I experienced in my upgrade.

My installation is fairly basic. The major packages I use include acme and haproxy. Before upgrading, I saw several packages needing upgrading. The upgrades failed due to dependency on PHP 8.x. I removed my haproxy-devel since I was planning to move to haproxy production version post upgrade.

Before upgrading I rebooted the gate. I then upgraded. On first boot on 23.01, I got a crash report. Several packages that remained at the time of upgrade were having issues loading PHP modules. I presumed that it was due to the installed version being dependent on PHP 7.x. I upgraded the packages, (re-)installed haproxy and rebooted. No service crashed on the reboot. The former haproxy configuration was intact. All seems well now.

I hope this might help another who is getting ready to upgrade.

[SteveITS]

@52buickman said in Netgate 4100 - 23.01 upgrade experience:

Before upgrading, I saw several packages needing upgrading. The upgrades failed

Yeah, don't ever do that. Uninstall packages before an upgrade, or leave them. Many/most packages leave their settings. We generally uninstall the "big" packages like Suricata and pfBlockerNG, and leave those like apcupsd.

If you are not on the latest version and need to install a package change the update branch to Previous Stable Version.

Somewhere I did see posts that PHP errors during the upgrade are to be expected. The pfBlocker version available at release also had a bug causing a PHP error at installation.