Fresh Install or Continue to use Auto Update
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This question basically revolves around the pros/cons of performing a fresh install vs using the auto update feature.
Regardless of operating system, many people will argue (including myself) that performing fresh installs is generally "better" than layering on updates to a system. Although it might totally be a simple case of the placebo effect, I have generally had better experience with fresh installs of OS X updates, windows service packs, etc. verses lathering on the updates over periods of months (and possible years of time). I am unfamiliar with the way auto update handles updates. I'm curious where the argument would stand in regards to pfSense (FreeBSD).
Chris
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If you feel better you can do a fresh install and upload a config.xml, but in my opinion it is not necessary. It just takes a little more time to do a fresh installation.
I have pfSense installed on an SSD. -
As far as I know auto-update will only update existing files and add new files to the system but it will not remove "old" files if these are not used anymore.
Further if you are using pfsense 2.0.x with packages and then 2.1.x with packages then I would suggest to do a fresh installation because the way how packages are handled on pfsense 2.1 is different. It will work if you are using auto-update but then it could be possible that you have old pfsense 2.0.x package files left on the system and then install the packages the pfsense 2.1 way.
And if you played much with packages, installed some for testing and uninstalled them again and so on there could be fragments left.
So I personally go the way to do a fresh install until I know what I want to use and install. If I am just testing I am using the auto-update fuction.
