Netgate 2100 Bricked by Update
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HELP!
I have a new 2100 that today began flashing an orange light at me for the first time. I looked in the documentation and this said it was because a software update was available. Knowing this was important, I said yes and left the system to it.
A while later it was displaying an error saying that it needed an extra 4MB space to complete the update and I should wait for this to happen, but it kept refreshing and didn't move from that message. Then eventually it kicked out and went back to the login screen.
Why would this have happened though as I bought the 32GB version and before it was saying it was only using 4% of the disk space!?
Signing back in I saw that it couldn't see the internet so trying for an update or a rollback wouldn't work. I restored from a backup but the update that had been installed, I can't remember the version number but it must be the very latest, was still there. So I went for a factory reset. This still couldn't see the internet as it was the still newest firmware and not the previous version that worked.
I now have a bricked Netgate box (thanks!) that I've had to disconnect from my network. Does anybody have any idea what the hell I'm supposed to do now? Thanks all.
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@mikehalsey
Is this your first upgrade? (that's probably a rhetorical question, I'm assuming it is) What you describe sounds pretty normal. The "please wait" counter is short but really should be 10-15 minutes on devices with eMMC like the 2100, or more for a large upgrade, and this one upgrades to FreeBSD 14. It will just retry until it sees the router online again. Don't restart in the middle or it will partially install. It is supposed to land at the login page when done.I think you're referring to the "this will take 'n' more space" type of notice during any package install and that is normal.
What does the console show? You can check the upgrade log there. Other steps would be checking the WAN IP is correct, can you ping out from pfSense's Diagnostics menu, etc.
If it's new it probably has ZFS so you can just revert to an older boot environment.
You can get the 23.01 firmware to reinstall if nothing else.
The "factory default"/reset option just reverts the config file, not the disk.
The orange LED shows immediately upon release. I generally wait a week or so and watch the forums, but YMMV.
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@mikehalsey Guessing you were hit by this bug. It got me too! I had to go out to the field yesterday to restore a failed unit.
Sure enough, it was stuck on boot (eMMC corrupt). As luck would have it, they happened to be refinishing the floors on a Saturday (of course).
I was standing on a ladder, holding my laptop in one hand and pecking at the keyboard with the other, while trying to keep the tiny 0.5m USB serial cable (why did I think that was a good idea?) from yanking out and fuddling through the USB recovery process. Pretty soon the fumes were making my head spin and my fingers tingle so after about 20 minutes I said f**k it and hightailed it out of there.
Took it home and carefully re-flashed everything and the box is healthy again. Not sure why it wasn't working on site, but it was just that kind of day. Good luck fixing your unit.
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@luckman212 Yeah I got it too but was expecting it. Early models had a small EFI partition apparently (run “gpart show” and it’ll be either 800K or 200M…the latter I think is all ZFS installs). But that ends at a Marvell> console prompt so not quite as described.
If it was that, or an interrupted install, firmware reinstall is the solution.
Netgate has paused online upgrades to the 1100/2100 models. Per other posts this weekend they haven’t been able to duplicate it themselves.
