Auto-Update problems in amd64
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Have been trying to track down a problem going on with upgrades and auto updates recently.
Attempting an upgrade from an i386 build to amd64 seems to work, however the machines hangs
when it tries to reboot, and needs a power cycle. (It just sits at "an upgrade is in progress …...") forever.
(I would guess that this is because all the binaries have been replaced with 64bit ones which
the running i386 o/s is unable to execute... so it tries to reboot and just can't!)Moral of that story.... put the right one on in the first place!
Anyway....
I installed it again from a fresh amd64 .iso [ Wed Nov 3 04:01:58 UTC 2010 ]
Here is I think the cause of some of my problems, resulting in non-booting machines following an upgrade:
If I go into "Updater Settings" -> "Default Auto Update URLs" and select from this list
"2.0-BETA/FreeBSD-8 Snapshots…"The base URL link that this provides:
http://snapshots.pfsense.org/FreeBSD_RELENG_8_1/i386/pfSense_HEAD/.updaters
When the default I think should be:
http://snapshots.pfsense.org/FreeBSD_RELENG_8_1/amd64/pfSense_HEAD/.updaters/
If I select the "blank" option at the top of this dropdown and untick "Use a URL server for firmware upgrades other than www.pfsense.org" and hit save, then the default it uses reverts to "amd64"
This has resulted in some rather interesting upgrades and downgrades as the i386 build seems to be a bit
newer than the amd64 builds, so it upgraded me to the latest i386 build, and then I corrected the url, so
we went back to the amd64 previous build, which seems to result in a non-bootable machine.(It either hangs waiting for a hard reboot, or I get a kernel panic tcp_init and it reboots)
I recovered by just re-installing it all again.
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Now is a bad time for amd64 testing. :-)
http://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/995
Once that is resolved, you may want to repeat your tests. Though you are right, switching from amd64 to i386 does have some issues because the binaries that are executed at the end of the process are now incorrect for the platform having just been rewritten with the other architecture's binaries.
I thought we already preserved the reboot binary and had that sorted, but it's been a while since I tried it. Either way, wait for that ticket to be fixed and then do some tests.
The snapshot timing will always be off though, they run on two separate builders and start/stop at different times (mainly since amd64 doesn't have to take the extra few hours involved in making NanoBSD images)
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Current snap is OK:
2.0-BETA4 (amd64)
built on Tue Nov 9 17:26:01 UTC 2010
