Install of 24.03 went OK, but still have some questions and some input for devs.

Ramosel

I have been a long time proponent of doing such upgrades from a local console. It appears attaching to my SG-4860 via the access port/terminal view and choosing option 13 really doesn't do anything at this point. It looks to run something akin to an "apt-get update" but returns to the terminal screen with no further actions. Did I miss something or is option 13 just in need of some update to account for the selections in the web-GUI.

So, I just ran this update from the web GUI.... and monitored it via the terminal session.

It all ran well with 2 small exceptions:

Snort reload of rule set MD5 signatures ALL failed. After everything was up, running the update feature manually from the Snort GUI worked fine.
Upon completion of the update the web GUI under System Information/Version showed an error trying to get the current version. I selected the recycle button but got the same response. I went back to the Terminal window and it did indeed show as "pfSense Plus 24.03-RELEASE (amd64)". By this time I had gotten the family medical issue phone call I had stayed up for... so I let it be, minor issue, I'm tired, good-night
When I logged in this morning the web-GUI does now show the expected "The system is on the latest version."

All seems well, logs look good... as deep as I've looked in the logs.

With the new install selection features on the web GUI, is the Option 13 of the terminal now just unusable or does it need to be fixed...? Did I miss something?

Thanks guys...!

OH, and the new TAC-lite portal option to download the latest firmware for CYA local recovery worked great! (once I saw the note at the top of the screen)

stephenw10

Since 23.09 the upgrade system has (finally) switched to requiring the use actively select the new repo branch in order to upgrade. That prevents accidentally pulling packages from the new branch before upgrading for example. The dashboard check update check can now check all available repo branches so it show an upgrade there.
Once you have selected the new branch you can then upgrade from the console in the normal way. There is no way (currently) to switch the repo branch from the CLI.

There is an issue with some pkgs in the new upgrade system if you're running ZFS. The new system creates a new BE and runs most of the upgrade process in to the new BE before rebooting which allows much shorter downtime. However some packages have to run their install scripts after the boot and currently they try to do that before the network has finished configuring. That results in connection failures if they try to update signatures like that: https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/15396

The new version of pfSense-upgrade reports the status check more accurately. At that point, immediately after upgrading, pkg may still be running in the background completing package installs etc. Until that finishes the update check cannot run and correctly reports the check data as invalid. As soon as the other pkg processes complete it will check and show the update status. In previous versions it would show
the system as up to date there even if it was actually unable to check.

So it sounds like everything you saw is expected.

Steve