2.1 to 2.1.2 upgrade - word of warning

[Gob]

Hi

I just performed an auto upgrade from 2.1 to 2.1.2 on one of our pfSense boxes.
Although the upgrade worked OK, it forced me to re assign the interfaces to nics before the networking came up.

Not a major issue whilst sat in front of the box but I have another 30 boxes to upgrade remotely all over the world. What would be a relatively simple and quick job now means I have to liaise with remote offices and arrange for technical staff to be onsite.

[fragged]

I'm fairly sure that this shouldn't happen. I've upgraded my installation which has 2 Intel em nic's and it went fine. There's likely something in your setup that caused this to happen as it's not a widely reported issue.

[Gob]

This was a 7-NIC box with 5 intels and a couple of broadcoms. not all nics were in use so perhaps that had something to do with it.
Will test on a few more local boxes before I attempt an unattended remote install :)

[jasonlitka]

The Intel drivers were upgraded in 2.1.1 to add support for newer models.  I'm guessing one or more NICs showed up in this new build and they were detected before the old ones, forcing the ports to reorder.

[Gob]

OK, that possibly explains it.
The ports didn't get re-ordered, the boot up after the upgrade asked for the ports to be configured…
"do you want to configure VLAN support" wizard etc etc

[cmb]

The only way that happens is if you have NICs assigned in your config that aren't actually present anymore. Then things can't function until the system knows what NICs it should be using, since what's in your config isn't actually valid (NIC removed from the system generally, on occasion a hardware failure will make a NIC disappear entirely).

If you go to Interfaces>assign before the upgrade and verify all your assigned interfaces actually exist, remove or fix any that don't, that won't happen.