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    Be careful trying to restore backup of 2.4.5p1

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Problems Installing or Upgrading pfSense Software
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    • F
      fresnoboy
      last edited by

      So I wasted most of yesterday trying to deal with a bug in restoring a config. 2.4.5p1 has a rarely occurring mbuf bug that in my configuration causes a crash every 3 weeks or so. I posted about it, but it's not anything obvious, and given all the network drivers change in freebsd 12, it made sense to put up with it and wait until 2.5 was stable and upgrade and see if it still occurred.

      Well, in addition to the issues in 2.5, 2.5 doesn't seem to work well with the mods to enable AT&T gateway bypass in fiber installations (https://github.com/MonkWho/pfatt). So I am waiting for that to be resolved before upgrading.

      Friday night pfsense panic'd again, but this time corrupted the image so it wouldn't just reboot. Well, that's a problem, but I run virtualized, and have a config backup from a couple months ago. So I restored a snapshot from back in july of last year, brought the system back up, and then restored the recent config.xml from the dead configuration that I extracted by mounting that image on a different freebsd machine on the same host.

      Things went OK for a bit, but then I couldn't log in to the system, and then when I tried rebooting, it spewed out a bunch or errors and failed.

      It appears that what happened was the config.xml backup I was using had a the upgrade release train set automatically. When it started reinstalling the plugins, it didn't use the 2.4.5p1 packages for the running system that was backed up, but the 2.5.0 ones. This hosed the libraries and eventually completely hosed the system.

      I went back to the old version snapshot from last summer, but it didn't have a bunch of changes I had put in, and was causing other problems but at least I had connectivity.

      I wasted a bunch of time on this until noticing that the restore function has an option for restoring just part of the config! So I restored everything one by one and just didn't restore the package configuration. That led to a mostly complete restoral of functionality, but there were a bunch of entries that had been added to my freeradius configuration that I needed. So I snapshotted the functional system, did a full restore of the problematic conbfig.xml, but before the system went nuts during the plugin rebuild, I copied the data from freeradius via cut and paste to notepad, and then restored the snapshot. After I manually typed in the deltas, everything was fine again.

      So if you are running 2.4.5p1, MAKE SURE you are on the 2.4.5 release train (DEPRECATED) in the update configuration before you do the backup of the config. By default I think pfsense sets the upgrade to the current 2.5.0 train, and you will have a lot of issues if you try and restore with that backup.

      Moreover, this seems to be a bug - during restore, it should use the repos for the running version, not the branch being used for updates. Restore should ALWAYS work to get you to back where you were, and then do updates after that configuration is restored.

      Is there a bug posted on this behavior already?

      Thanks
      mike

      S bingo600B 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • S
        SteveITS Galactic Empire @fresnoboy
        last edited by

        https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/10464

        Pre-2.7.2/23.09: Only install packages for your version, or risk breaking it. Select your branch in System/Update/Update Settings.
        When upgrading, allow 10-15 minutes to restart, or more depending on packages and device speed.
        Upvote šŸ‘ helpful posts!

        F 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • F
          fresnoboy @SteveITS
          last edited by fresnoboy

          @steveits

          Thanks. This is a major bug! There should be a sticky somewhere to warn people about this.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • S
            serbus
            last edited by

            Hello!

            Maybe related :

            https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/10645

            John

            Lex parsimoniae

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • bingo600B
              bingo600 @fresnoboy
              last edited by

              @fresnoboy

              Have a look here , a way to "fallback"
              https://forum.netgate.com/post/965219

              /Bingo

              If you find my answer useful - Please give the post a šŸ‘ - "thumbs up"

              pfSense+ 23.05.1 (ZFS)

              QOTOM-Q355G4 Quad Lan.
              CPUĀ  : Core i5 5250U, Ram : 8GB Kingston DDR3LV 1600
              LANĀ  : 4 x Intel 211, DiskĀ  : 240G SAMSUNG MZ7L3240HCHQ SSD

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