How to reinstall packages on 2.4.5?

[mcarson75]

I tried the upgrade to 2.5.0. Many things didn't work. (OpenVPN tunnels to NordVPN, 1 of my IPSec tunnels, NUT, web pages taking a long time to load, both the pfsense gui and other pages).

After spending all afternoon troubleshooting and getting nowhere, I decided to reinstall 2.4.5 for now. I had several issues at first with the restore breaking everything when it tried to reinstall packages. Finally figured I needed to set the branch to 2.4.5 and was able to do the restore and get most things back up.

However, it only installed the ACME package. I also need Avahi, haproxy, NUT, and pfBlocker. When I go to choose any of these however it just hangs on "Please wait while the update system initializes" and doesn't do anything further.

How can I reinstall the correct packages? I'm fine with working at the command line if necessary.

Thanks,
-Matt

[Traveller]

@mcarson75 You need to go to the System > Update page and select the Previous stable version (2.4.5 DEPRECATED) branch.

This will allow you to install packages on 2.4.5.

[mcarson75]

@traveller, thanks. I had already done that actually, but it still doesn't work. I've discovered that Package Manager seems to be broken. Trying to run pkg -v at the command line returns

Shared object "libarchive.so.7" not found, required by "pkg"

I also see these lines at the console where I would normally see the interfaces:

/usr/local/bin/php-cgi: Undefined symbol "alphasort@FBSD_1.5"
/usr/local/bin/php: Undefined symbol "alphasort@FBSD_1.5"

So I think the restore process is still breaking something. Just not sure how to go about fixing it. Maybe restoring things one by one?

Thanks,
-Matt

[Traveller]

@mcarson75 The earlier installs might have broken things.

Consider starting again, and changing the branch first thing.

I got lucky in that things hung, but I still have a working Package Manager. Then, I found the correct solution.

Good luck!

[mcarson75]

@traveller thanks, I'll keep playing. Last time I did a clean bare-metal install of 2.4.5, then set the branch, then restored my backup. I think I should have set the branch on my old setup before I took the backup in the first place, but a bit late for that. I did try manually modifying the config xml to set the branch but it still didn't work. I'll try a few other things. I might have an older backup too.

[mcarson75]

I finally got everything running on 2.4.5. I made a copy of my config.xml file and deleted the entire <installedpackages> section and restored everything else. I made sure that branch was set to 2.4.5, and then installed all of the packages I needed. Then I restored just the package manager from my original backup. Finally everything seems to be back up and working.

[Traveller]

@mcarson75 Oof!

Glad you got that sorted.