SG3100 upgrade failing 24.03 to 24.11

onnastick

Hello. I upgraded from 24.03 to 24.11 and everything appeared to be going normally. After it finished with no apparent errors, and while I waited for it to reboot, it never seemed to come back up, even after several minutes. Definitely considerably longer than the other upgrades I have done. So I decided eventually to power cycle the box. When I did, it did boot back up, but back on 24.03 again. I guess it backed out somehow.

But a banner is now running on top of the main page that states "Netgate pfSense Plus has detected a crash report or programming bug. Click here for more information." When I clicked the link it downloads a PHP_errors.log file which I will attempt to attach here or otherwise make it available. In addition, every time the main dashboard screen loads and the box attempts to check for updated, I get a notification (mine come by email) with the following contents:

Notifications in this message: 1
================================

22:58:17 PHP ERROR: Type: 1, File: /etc/inc/util.inc, Line: 4569, Message: Uncaught Error: Undefined constant "AF_INET" in /etc/inc/util.inc:4569
Stack trace:
#0 /etc/inc/pkg-utils.inc(1342): get_dnsavailable()
#1 /usr/local/www/widgets/widgets/system_information.widget.php(90): get_system_pkg_version()
#2 {main}
  thrown

Any advice on how to resolve the issues and complete the upgrade would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

lnguyen

Last night, I upgraded 3 x Netgate 3100 from 24.03 to 24.11. Expect the 3100 to take 10-12 minutes to come online after the upgrade reboot. Also expect the CPU to spike to 100% after it comes back online as it downloads and upgrades any packages that were previously installed. Be patient as this box is slow. Grateful that Netgate is supporting this very last round of pfSense+ upgrade on an EOL box

stephenw10

Yes sounds like it had not completed the upgrade and now might have mismatched files.

You can try to run the upgrade again to complete it. You might try upgrading from the console so you can see when it completes.

But be sure to backup the config in case you need to re-install.

Steve

onnastick

Thank you for the replies! Unfortunately, the GUI is not even able to check for upgrades anymore and produces the notification I pasted above any time it does try. However, I was unaware of the option of upgrading through the console. So I enabled SSH and that option does seem to work. I will need to wait another couple days or so before I attempt it, but it does appear to successfully check for upgrades and allows me to run the upgrade. I'll report back with any updates once I am able to run it.

I was able to download the config xml file from /conf/backup/ directory from the day before I first tried the upgrade. So hopefully that will be sufficient should I need to start over.

When I was trying to fix this the other night, I did actually perform the "Factory Defaults" function. Then after the reboot, I logged in and restored the xml file I mentioned above - from the day before I first tried the upgrade. All that worked fine - but after the required reboot that happens after restoring, the problem was back again where the GUI cannot search for upgrades anymore.

Odd - I really hope that upgrading from the console works, and when it's done the box goes back to all "normal" behavior.

stephenw10

You can always reinstall clean. It's pretty quick and easy to do if you have serial console access already.

onnastick

I want to thank you again for the suggestions. During a low usage period, I connected with SSH and ran the update from there (option 13). Despite the GUI update interface still not behaving normally, this approach was able to initiate the update fine. It took a few minutes before the box really went offline and then took 12+ minutes before it started replying to pings once again.

After that, I was able to log into the GUI and all the weirdness that was happening before seems to be gone, I'm running the new version, and nothing appears to be complaining. So I should be good. I will make sure to backup the DHCP static mappings and the VPN configuration/keys. Those are really the only things we'd need to get back if a clean install is ever called for.

After a bit more reading, I have realized there may soon be no more updates that will work on the 3100 due to its CPU architecture not being widely supported from a FreeBSD package perspective. So I'll look to replace in the coming months - likely with either a 2100 or 4200.

stephenw10

Nice result!

Yes the 3100 is EoL. It may or may not get 25.01 depending on how broken the build is.

Additionally it can't run ZFS. The new upgrade process using ZFS BEs reduces downtime at upgrade a lot.