[ER] persistently disable installed package…

rcfa · Jun 22, 2012, 11:22 PM

It seems that there are plenty of packages that one can't disable, once they are installed.
I'd like to be able to install these things, and then turn them on/off on an as needed basis, or as I find time to play around with configuration options, but then go back to a known-to-work state by disabling them until I have more time to play around.

There's the start/stop services thing on the Dashboard, but that doesn't always seem to work, because it doesn't seem to retain the state across reboots, and also some things seem to reactivate themselves somehow for whatever reason.

So it would be nice if the "installed packages" page would have check boxes that allow packages to be activated/deactivated, and have these settings persist.

Am I missing something?

Cino · Jun 23, 2012, 1:31 AM

usually the package will have an enable checkbox that needs to be checked for it to be enabled.. Even snort has it for each interface. If they aren't working, open a bug report per-package redmine.pfsense.org and post on the forum.

rcfa · Jun 23, 2012, 2:12 AM

@Cino:

usually the package will have an enable checkbox that needs to be checked for it to be enabled.. Even snort has it for each interface. If they aren't working, open a bug report per-package redmine.pfsense.org and post on the forum.

I'll have to go through the various packages…

...but since pfSense shuts them down before a reboot, I wonder if the startup/shutdown mechanism couldn't be made available in a more centralized way, as in the Dashboard.

As for the individual packages, there are certainly things not working properly all over, e.g. Dansguardian is enabled, but isn't running. Snort, doesn't show properly which interfaces are running, and at some point was blocking my IPv6 traffic, but showed up as not running, etc. Of course, currently there's a lot in flux with all the pbi package building, etc. So I'll wait until things have settled down a little bit before I go over all the packages individually...

cmb · Jun 23, 2012, 4:00 PM

You can uninstall them and the settings persist. The ability to enable/disable is definitely something every package maintainer should be building in and I'd estimate most do. Any that don't, I'd bring it up on the packages board. Service status is not meant to persist across reboots.