Upgrade from 1.2.3 to fairly recent 2.0 BETA snapshot build

[wallabybob]

I unexpectently had some free time today and decided to upgrade my production pfSense from 1.2.3 to snapshot 2.0-BETA5 (i386) built on Wed Feb 9 16:14:43 EST 2011 which was what I had available and seemed to work well on my test system.

If I recall correctly the party line has been that the configuration file should just convert and everything work as it did. So I thought it might be a public service to test this out. Some unexpected things in the upgrade:

1. On first boot after the upgrade I was asked to reassign interfaces. I presume this is because the FreeBSD device name of my WAN interface changed from udav0 to ue0.

2. Though I specified WLAN, DMZ and OPT3 interfaces during the reassign (my 1.2.3 configuration had LAN, WAN, WLAN, DMZ and OPT3 interfaces) the names didn't stick in the configuration (the Interfaces menu showed LAN, OPT1, OPT2, OPT3 and WAN).

3. Only the LAN and WAN interfaces were enabled even though WLAN, DMZ and OPT3 were enabled in the 1.2.3 configuration. (Interfaces OPT1, [ath0] OPT2 [rl0] and OPT3 [run0] did not have their Enable Interface box ticked.)

4. The LAN interface is no longer bridged with WLAN (ath0). (A consequence of 2) or 3)?) At least, # ifconfig -a shows vr0 as the only member of bridge0. I expected to see ath0 there as well.

5. The console repeatedly (but not continuously) reports:
   arprequest: cannot find matching address

6. I enabled OPT1, named it WLAN. All the previously set (in pfSense 1.2.3) parameters appeared to be intact.

7. Then I went to Interfaces, clicked on the Bridges tab and saw :

BRIDGE0 LAN, WLAN Converted bridged lan   
BRIDGE1 WLAN, LAN Converted bridged opt1

Do I need both these bridges?

8. Diagnostics -> States, Reset States tab, click on Reset States button seems to stall for a long time. (After a few minutes I got sick of waiting.)

9. My WLAN network was initially created as a standalone subnet. I had a firewall rule on the WLAN interface allowing any traffic from WLAN subnet. Later I bridged the WLAN to LAN. I didn't adjust that rule because it didn't cause any problems. After the upgrade and bridging WLAN to LAN traffic from WLAN was blocked and logged: wireless clients couldn't access the pfSense box or the Internet. I changed the rule to allow any traffic from LAN subnet and that allowed wireless clients to access the pfSense box and the Internet.

[jimp]

Looks like in 1.2.3 you had LAN bridged to WLAN and WLAN bridged to LAN, which isn't valid. You only need WLAN bridged to LAN.

You might roll back to 1.2.3, fix that, and try the upgrade again - and use the most current snapshot available, not an older one.

[wallabybob]

@jimp:

Looks like in 1.2.3 you had LAN bridged to WLAN and WLAN bridged to LAN,

Yes, the old config.xml has LAN bridged to WLAN and WLAN bridge to LAN.

@jimp:

You might roll back to 1.2.3, fix that, and try the upgrade again

After a bit of tweaking my configuration seems to work so I don't feel I need to do the upgrade again. However I'm happy to do a configuration upgrade if you think it would be useful to the wider community. Could I do that in a less invasive way, for example just copy a 1.2.3 config file to /cf/conf/config.xml and then do a firmware upgrade? Or is the configuration file upgrade triggered by something outside the configuration file?

[jimp]

If you have the old config.xml still, it would be enough to just install 2.0 fresh and then restore the configuration.