Netgate 2100 upgrading from 23.09 to 24.11
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Looks like I cannot just do this upgrade via the pfsense upgrade process. Would anyone have the detailed instructions to do this upgrade? I have tried searching but no luck.
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@kassal9812 Sure you can. Did you change branches? Why do you think you can’t?
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You will need to upgrade to 23.09_1 first. You should then see both 24.03 and 24.11 offered.
And from either of those you will see 25.07.
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@stephenw10 said in Netgate 2100 upgrading from 23.09 to 24.11:
You will need to upgrade to 23.09_1 first. You should then see both 24.03 and 24.11 offered.
And from either of those you will see 25.07.
Hi Steve,
I too have an SG-1100 still on 23.09.1. I would like to try upgrading to 25.07. Which upgrade path would be the safest bet:- 23.09.1 -> 24.03 -> 25.07
OR - 23.09.1 -> 24.11 -> 25.07
?
Thank you.
Kind regards,
Selwin
- 23.09.1 -> 24.03 -> 25.07
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@Cabledude it should not matter, either should be fine.
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@SteveITS Thank you sir.
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Indeed, either should work. But I would probably choose 23.09.1 -> 24.11 -> 25.07 because the smallest step to 25.07 seems less likely to hit RAM exhaustion issues anecdotally.
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@stephenw10 said in Netgate 2100 upgrading from 23.09 to 24.11:
Indeed, either should work. But I would probably choose 23.09.1 -> 24.11 -> 25.07 because the smallest step to 25.07 seems less likely to hit RAM exhaustion issues anecdotally.
Hi Steve,
Would the same upgrade path apply to an SG-1100 (UFS file system) that is still on 23.09.1? -
@Cabledude Jumping in, generally yes.
On an 1100 you might find you need to either a) uninstall packages (per the upgrade guide), b) reboot before upgrade (also in the guide IIRC), and/or c) upgrade at the console not web GUI. YMMV.
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Yup the 1100 has the least RAM of any Netgate device so is most likely to hit this.
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@SteveITS said in Netgate 2100 upgrading from 23.09 to 24.11:
@Cabledude Jumping in, generally yes.
On an 1100 you might find you need to either a) uninstall packages (per the upgrade guide), b) reboot before upgrade (also in the guide IIRC), and/or c) upgrade at the console not web GUI. YMMV.
Also
@stephenw10For the remote 1100, I drove over to the remote site about a month ago, went from 23.09 to 24.11 first, using the console with the netgate installer. I also went from UFS to ZFS in that process.
Then I ran out of time so i left it as it was, confident that I had a fresh ZFS install so it would be robust enough to reboot in case of power outages. An outage actually occurred which sadly left the device crippled. My S2S IPSec was down and so was my OpenVPN admin instance. My UniFi dash was reachable so I knew I could leave it until the next visit. UniFi also told me there was traffic.
Today I went to the remote site again and noticed an extremely laggy UI. Dash reload could take minutes and removing widgets one by one to speed it up took forever.
So I rebooted two times, which helped to normalize the responsiveness, deleted all packages and upgraded from 24.11 to 25.11.1 over the GUI. This was a straightforward process, just short of perfection as there was no internet connection to the clients after the upgrade finished, even though no problems were logged. After another reboot all seemed well so I went home.
The eMMC today showed 10% and 30% wear respectively, just like it did a year ago, upon which I decided to set the RAM drive option. Apparently this may have worked or at least may have contributed to zero extra eMMC wear. I am unsure whether or not the 10/30% wear could contribute to the behaviour described above.
If I should decide to keep this SG1100 operational I may opt for an external SSD which I already have running successfully on a test unit.I am reluctant to upgrade the hardware to an SG2100 as it’s a steep price increase over the 1100 and the SG1100 in question is hardly pushed to any mildly serious routing: all it does is serving internet for one person and a Synology peer to peer backup over the S2S every night. I may add a Home Assistant instance soon but that won’t weigh in heavily either.
I also notice that the 1100 is still listed in the Netgate appliances section, even though in this topic limited RAM is considered to be a concern when upgrading pfSense plus versions.
Would it be at all possible to create RAM drives from storage? Lets say I do add an SSD with 120GB storage, would it be possible to use say 1GB off that drive to increase the RAM to 2GB? This could help overcome the RAM issues and make for a more stable and error free user experience.
Thanks, Pete
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A partially worn eMMC would make no difference to operational speed, no.
You could potentially add SWAP on an external drive but my experience there as been it's almost always a bad idea. It will be much slower than actual RAM.
Using UFS with RAM drives actually requires least RAM and I have yet to see a filesystem issue when RAM drives are enabled. But that does restrict pkg installs. And you don't get ZFS BE snapshots.
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@stephenw10 okay thank you for your insights. Ironically, the UFS 23.09 setup this 1100 ran up until mid January has proved to be super stable, though there haven’t been any power outages in that period. I only decided to upgrade the device because I felt that the gap between 23.09 and 25.11.1 was getting too wide for comfort.
Your advice (and that of @SteveITS) helped me to get this far. I think I’ll just let the 1100 purr along for a while and see if it’s stable. If not 100% satisfied I’ll try to add the SSD and see if that improves things.
Kind regards,
Pete
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