FpSense Upgrade Score 0 out of 4 - why?

LeiShen

From the past few years of running pfSense, I have tried to do the upgrades from the Dashboard through 4 different versions. And every time, including today's from 2.3.4 to 2.4.3, it has failed - even though it always reports 'Sucessful'. And, yes, I wait a very long time for it to complete - watching the web page say

'Still not ready. Waiting 20sec'

again and again and again.
After every upgrade attempt, the pc fails to boot and I must resort to installing a new copy of pfSense from a USB boot stick.
Why? Why has it always failed?
I can't find any full system status in pfSense (memory, disk, cpu, speed, etc), so attached are screenshots from the dashboard as well as a image of the system specs from the vendor.
The latest errors I got when I tried to upgrade from 2.3.4 to 2.4.3 was a quick blink of

'No Core Dump Found'

followed by pages and pages of:

Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library 'balabalabala': invalid file format in Unknown on line 0
Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library 'balabalabala' - Shared object "libssl.so.7" not found. required by "openssl.so" in Unknown on line 0"

The last lines I get are:

pfSense 2.4.3-RELEASE amd64 Thu May 10 15:02:52 CDT 2018
Boot complete
FreeBSD/amd64 (Amnesiac) (tty0)
Login:

But no pfSense. No Menus, no options, just a login prompt and nothing else.
The fact that I am on the internet now and can write this plea for help is only because I knew the upgrade would fail and has downloaded 2.4.3 to manually install in that event (which I really do appreciate that option, but it in a PITA to pull the PC out of the 'closet' hook it up to the tv & keyboard, load the USB stick and re-install the reload the old configuration). BTW, the new install looks very nice!
I hope someone can help point me to what I'm doing wrong or something that needs to be set to allow upgrades. This manual process is getting very old.
Thank you.

Dashboard.PNG_thumb

Specs.jpg_thumb

Gertjan

Hi,

I understand your question..
This is what I saw yesterday https://pastebin.com/aUAv10ic - the upgrade went just fine - it rebooted, and was up after a minute or so. It's like this the last several (10 ?) years. Can't remember it broke something (except for bad SAT drives - bad DDRAM ….).

Two advises :
Before upgrading, restart your pfSense.
After restating, check dmesg log (go god mode, option 8 and type dmesg - check for errors, document yourself about the errors ans warnings).
Make a config copy.
Then upgrade.

Btw : an upgrade log exists. If new pfSense "core files" can't be written (overwritten) I would for sure want to know why they didn't copy.

The only difference between your pfSense setup, and mine is :
NOT pfSEnse, the code is identical.
Your are probably using other FreeBSD drivers, because your hardware is different.
Your config is different, our are using probably other packages as I do.

LeiShen

Thank you!
I'll bookmark this page and go through those items next time I attempt and upgrade and it fails. :)