pfSense 2.4.4-RELEASE is now available!

jwt · Sep 24, 2018, 9:38 PM

I saw a lot of PHP fixes on redline for 2.4.4 after RC release. Were they implemented in the RC since the release of RC or are they implemented in 2.4.5-Dev?

If they were material to functionality in 2.4.4, then they'r pin 2.4.4, otherwise, they're in 'master' which will yield a number of releases. a 2.4.4-p1 is already being planned.

There have been a lot of PHP fixed going from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.2. This change has exposed a lot of poorly-written PHP that was written in the past. Example:

https://redmine.pfsense.org/projects/pfsense/repository/revisions/8501d8477c007a768537ebcb5a916f8f8ebb4091/diff/src/etc/inc/filter.inc

https://redmine.pfsense.org/projects/pfsense/repository/revisions/1ed21e0a2512554752de35d5758bcff503fcba9b/diff

PHP 7 is a lot more "picky" than was 5.6, and pfSense is 100,000 lines of PHP spread over 200 files.

When we say that these errors on upgrade are typically harmless, we mean it.

wgstarks · Sep 25, 2018, 1:08 AM

Is there a guide for updating using a factory image? This is the first update I have done on my SG-3100 and I’m not quite sure of the process.

jimp · Sep 25, 2018, 1:13 AM

@wgstarks said in pfSense 2.4.4-RELEASE is now available!:

Is there a guide for updating using a factory image? This is the first update I have done on my SG-3100 and I’m not quite sure of the process.

The same steps as CE. It is already configured internally for the factory repositories.

You might want to login to the portal and download an installer image for the 3100.

wgstarks · Sep 25, 2018, 1:19 AM

@jimp said in pfSense 2.4.4-RELEASE is now available!:

@wgstarks said in pfSense 2.4.4-RELEASE is now available!:

Is there a guide for updating using a factory image? This is the first update I have done on my SG-3100 and I’m not quite sure of the process.

The same steps as CE. It is already configured internally for the factory repositories.

So just process as outlined in the guide in the first post?

You might want to login to the portal and download an installer image for the 3100.

Is this just for a backup? All I see in the portal is the recover images for clean install.

jimp · Sep 25, 2018, 1:20 AM

@wgstarks said in pfSense 2.4.4-RELEASE is now available!:

@jimp said in pfSense 2.4.4-RELEASE is now available!:

@wgstarks said in pfSense 2.4.4-RELEASE is now available!:

Is there a guide for updating using a factory image? This is the first update I have done on my SG-3100 and I’m not quite sure of the process.

The same steps as CE. It is already configured internally for the factory repositories.

So just process as outlined in the guide in the first post?

Yep.

You might want to login to the portal and download an installer image for the 3100.

Is this just for a backup? All I see in the portal is the recover images for clean install.

Yep. Just in case.

wgstarks · Sep 25, 2018, 1:21 AM

@jimp
Thanks. Big help.

Joe Friday · Sep 25, 2018, 2:45 AM

Thank-You very much for the new update, and all the hard work you guys put into the new release!

ramup · Sep 25, 2018, 10:04 PM

Hello jimp,

I saw the C-ICAP Squid package was updated and I can confirm that C-ICAP is now working properly under 2.4.4 after update.

But the reason I (unintentionally) updated to 2.4.4 was not very satisfying. The acme package was updated even for 2.4.3 users. The problem is when a user has 2.4.3 installed (like me) and updates the acme package some php 7.2 packages are installed, too which causes a lot of PHP errors under 2.4.3 because it also tries to update to 2.4.4. I could not stop this upgrade process and so I received a lot of PHP errors. So I said, ok I will update to 2.4.4 but I could not update to 2.4.4 via web interface or console because there were errors. I had to use the shell and "pfSense-upgrade -d"

So please restrict the current ACME package (with dependencies to php7.2) to 2.4.4 users only!

Grimson · Sep 25, 2018, 10:09 PM

@ramup
https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/8938

tman222 · Sep 26, 2018, 1:28 AM

Upgraded to 2.4.4 this evening and things thankfully went smooth. Started the upgrade process and got the dreaded "upgrade failed" after it had downloaded 74 or so of the packages. However, I have had this error occur on at least one or two other release upgrades in the past as well, and after each of those the system came back up just fine. In this case, the system also came up after a couple minutes, though I was greeted with a message that pfSense had crashed. I didn't pay close attention to it at the time, figuring it may have been related to the major PHP version upgrade. Thankfully, since then there have been no further errors.

Everything appears to be working great, and I really appreciate the the feature additions to the GUI to enable fq_codel, and DNS over TLS / QNAME minimization for Unbound.

Thanks again for all you hard work on this release.

ravegen · Sep 26, 2018, 1:34 AM

Updated my version 2.4.3_1 to 2.4.4 and got this error paste on pastebin because its is lengthy.

https://pastebin.com/Rt1LcH42

trees spanning the land · Sep 26, 2018, 10:12 AM

When I updated a lot of our Site to site links with open vpn broke resulting in all our tunnels having to be deleted and re-created with the exact same settings, attempts to restore from a backup were un-successful

ramup · Oct 2, 2018, 9:07 AM

I just wanted to mention that since the update to 2.4.4 and the C-ICAP fix the system is working really well and the webinterface is much quicker thanks to PHP7.

So I just want to say thank you to you all for making pfSense better and better ;)

ShMw · Nov 5, 2018, 9:38 AM

@rico @jimp

In my case it bricked my device (SG-8860), no interfaces came back up after the upgrade and I was locked out, similar error messages were displayed on the console that were mentioned in this thread. I had to re-install from scratch.

There is clearly a big risk when upgrading to this release, I had to learn about it the hard way...

ShMw · Nov 5, 2018, 9:42 AM

There is clearly a big risk when upgrading to this release, I had to learn about it the hard way...

To be fair, it upgraded just fine on my test system ...

Rico · Nov 5, 2018, 12:10 PM

Did you Upgrade with (lots) packages installed? This is not recommended.

-Rico

jimp · Nov 5, 2018, 3:17 PM

@shmw said in pfSense 2.4.4-RELEASE is now available!:

@rico @jimp

In my case it bricked my device (SG-8860), no interfaces came back up after the upgrade and I was locked out, similar error messages were displayed on the console that were mentioned in this thread. I had to re-install from scratch.

There is clearly a big risk when upgrading to this release, I had to learn about it the hard way...

There is not a big risk when done properly. I've upgraded dozens of things to 2.4.4 and maybe had a problem only a small number of times, if that.

And without knowing what specific errors you hit, there is no way to tell you what might have happened.

There is a ton of information in the release notes, release announcement, upgrade guide, and upgrade troubleshooting documentation. It covers every problem case we know of.

The only way to found this out "the hard way" is to ignore everything we've posted about it.

ShMw · Nov 5, 2018, 4:04 PM

@jimp

Thanks for your reply, and I don't think I ignored what was available in the release notes. I did perform the upgrade on a test system which I keep in parity with production, and like I said, it upgraded just fine. I had the same packages installed as well (only two iperf, Cron). I feel I had taken all the precautions necessary.

I recall that the errors were very similar to what @ravegen posted. In my case however, none of the interfaces came up and the main menu was unresponsive while connected to the serial console. I'm afraid I was more focused on getting the system back online before the workday started than capturing errors.

It's a pity I can't fully trust these "significant" upgrades to pfSense...

Would you consider in releasing smaller incremental updates more often?

jimp · Nov 5, 2018, 4:14 PM

The errors that person posted were not relevant, though. They look like a normal part of the upgrade process (or possibly an issue with pfBlocker, which you say you didn't have).

I don't recall anyone saying their console was unresponsive, however. I would have liked to have seen a full serial console session recording of what was happening, but since it's reinstalled now, that isn't possible.

There is no "incremental" way to do PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.2. That's been the biggest cause of problems.

Some issues from the jump to FreeBSD 11.2 but nothing major by comparison.

ubernupe · Nov 5, 2018, 6:44 PM

This post is deleted!