Upgrade from 2.4.0-BETA to 2.4.0 possible?

-flo- 0

Can I do an upgrade from a 2.4.0-BETA version to a 2.4.0 without fresh install?

I have:

2.4.0-BETA (amd64)
built on Fri Aug 04 07:30:39 CDT 2017
FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE-p11

It offers an upgrade to 2.4.1 only.

Due to problems with 2.4.1 (PPPoE on WAN) I do not want to upgrade to 2.4.1. Also I have a backup of a configuration based on 2.4.0 which I urgently want to use. (I already was on 2.4.0 but had to reinstall today. I only had the BETA image available and was offline so no download possible …)

jimp

The way the package repositories work, that isn't easy to pull off. You would be better off either reinstalling with 2.4.0 and using the 'recover config.xml' to return to a working state quickly, or upgrading to 2.4.2 which has that PPP+VLAN bug fixed already, among other things.

-flo- 0

Reinstalling is what I did in the meantime, thank you nonetheless for the feedback.

I have a followup question. Assumed I have packages installed and a working config.xml available including the configuration for these packages. What is the fastest way to reinstall?

I did a clean install providing the config.xml on installation. In a second step I installed the packages and again restored the config.xml.

Can this be done in one single step? Like having pfSense optionally reinstall packages for which configuration data is contained in the config.xml on initial install?

-flo- 0

By the way.

I was forced into reinstalling because my installation broke when I restored a config I had created only minutes before.

The backup config.xml included RRD data and after the restore I got a message saying some specific line from the RRD data wasn't allowed twice in the config. (Something like that, I don't remember exactly what the message was and I found no duplicated lines in the file anyway.)

After this the WEB GUI was completely down and my pfSense was offline. Restarting the machine didn't help. There was no way left to restore another (older or repaired) config.xml. Login with ssh was possible but even other options in the console menu didn't work. Due to being offline I had no opportunity to ask the community how to resolve this.

So I reinstalled the system using the most current version I had available locally which was a 2.4.0 BETA.

Lessons learned:

Prefer the config history feature to revert to previous settings over restoring a config file.
Don't backup RRD data, feature is broken anyway.
Run pfSense with zfs. Even with no redundancy (1 ssd in the system) this still provides snapshots on a system level in case restoring a config.xml doesn't work. Create snapshots regularly.
Have an installation image available locally for the current and at least one previous pfSense version (even if the system got updated online).