pfSense Plus and Hardware Upgrades

tman222 · Mar 4, 2023, 7:27 PM

Hi all,

I'm looking to upgrade a firewall within the next few months and would like to restore the pfSense Plus configuration from the current firewall onto the new system. From what I have been reading, it will probably make sense to wait until 2.7.0 CE is released so that there is quick and direct path to 23.01 after pfSense CE has been installed.

I did have a couple other questions though:

In the case that some hardware may need to be reused between the old and new systems (e.g. let's say a network interface card), what happens if new hardware is installed into the new system after the pfSense Plus upgrade has already occurred (on the new system)? Will the pfSense Plus registration then still be valid or will the new system have to re-registered? If it is invalidated, will the new system stop functioning or be otherwise be limited?
If the new system has slightly different network interfaces than the old system (e.g. let's say Intel ix instead of igb interfaces) what happens when the current pfSense configuration is restored from the GUI? Will I be prompted to re-assign interfaces during the restore process or will the the restore throw an error and interface re-assignment needs to be done some other way?

Thanks in advance for the help and advice.

SteveITS · Mar 4, 2023, 7:31 PM

@tman222 Restoring will prompt to reassign interfaces if any are different.

Changing hardware will change the identifier Netgate creates. For a home/lab setup just get a new free key. I suspect having an invalid key just prevents updates, from what others have posted.

tman222 · Mar 4, 2023, 7:47 PM

@steveits said in pfSense Plus and Hardware Upgrades:

@tman222 Restoring will prompt to reassign interfaces if any are different.

Changing hardware will change the identifier Netgate creates. For a home/lab setup just get a new free key. I suspect having an invalid key just prevents updates, from what others have posted.

Thanks @SteveITS - if the only thing that stops working are future updates (until new pfSense Plus key is added) then I'm not too worried.

Michael.Schmalzl · Mar 19, 2023, 9:59 AM

@tman222 I cannot recommend a 1:1 clone of two different systems.
I killed my installation twice with the import of the clone from my APU2 onto my I226 based.
I had to crop quite a bunch of lines on the config until it worked.
I can recommend Notepad++ for editing.
There U also can edit the names of your interfaces like igb0-3 to igc0-4 like in my Case.