Things messed up after upgrade…
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Not sure what's going on, just posting this here, in case it rings a bell with someone.
Couple of days ago, ran an update, but things got wonky after that.
First, on the status page it showed which packages were installed, but it claimed it couldn't access the pfsense server to establish what the current package versions were.
I thought there might be a temporary outage, or a bug in pfsense, because the next build was unusually quickly posted. So I upgraded again. But this time the package lock wouldn't clear, i.e. for hours after it would still show the "installing packages" on the status page. So I cleared the package lock.
I had played around with snort and pfBlocker before, so I thought maybe there's an issue there, and I reverted to a previous backup, the last one before I made these changes.
It came back but now none of the packages were installed. I got the first one installed (asterisk), and by the time I wanted to install additional ones, all the installations failed.
So I reverted to an even older, known to be good configuration, but no luck. At this point it's gotten to the point where if I go to the status page I get just an error page:"Fatal error: Call to undefined function get_current_theme() in /usr/local/www/guiconfig.inc on line 68"
And that's all!
In a previous phase, I might have thought that I'm dealing with a worn-out flash card, but this system has an almost brand new intel SSD drive in it, so the few system upgrades I made since installing this one should not wear out the drive.
If anyone has an idea on what's going on here, it would be great.
It's also an example why the dual-partition thing that's available for the nanoBSD version of pfSense would be rather helpful for the regular version, too. This happens to be my home box, and I'm not traveling right now, but imagine this thing being somewhere else e.g. in some server room halfway across the country or globe? You may deal with major expenses and lengthy down-time if you can't just switch to a previous config on a different partition.
Ronald
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It's also an example why the dual-partition thing that's available for the nanoBSD version of pfSense would be rather helpful for the regular version, too. This happens to be my home box, and I'm not traveling right now, but imagine this thing being somewhere else e.g. in some server room halfway across the country or globe? You may deal with major expenses and lengthy down-time if you can't just switch to a previous config on a different partition.
This is why the full backup feature exists. It's also why you don't blindly upgrade to snapshots on any system that's remotely important without thorough testing unless you really, really know what you're doing.
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@cmb:
It's also an example why the dual-partition thing that's available for the nanoBSD version of pfSense would be rather helpful for the regular version, too. This happens to be my home box, and I'm not traveling right now, but imagine this thing being somewhere else e.g. in some server room halfway across the country or globe? You may deal with major expenses and lengthy down-time if you can't just switch to a previous config on a different partition.
This is why the full backup feature exists. It's also why you don't blindly upgrade to snapshots on any system that's remotely important without thorough testing unless you really, really know what you're doing.
That really wasn't the point here. The problem is, the system installed just fine on another box, so it's not an obvious issue with a broken build.
Also, things got really out of hand when I tried to restore the configurations that were created by the "full backup" feature during upgrades. So your suggesstion that this is why the full backup functionality exists is a tad besides the point, because obviously it didn't work as expected in this situation.
Further, the full backup is kind of useless if you can't use the GUI to be able to roll back, and lastly, restoring to a full backup didn't work as expected either.It's still not quite clear exactly what went on, e.g. if network glitches upset the upgrade process and left the system in an undefined state, or if accessing (not changing settings!) the GUI before the system was fully installed and all packages were reinstalled upset the upgrade, which would be not a good situation.
My points were simply these:
a) maybe someone knows what might have triggered that behavior, so I can be watchful of specific things that would trigger it, or it might lead to the discovery of some bug (e.g. some issues with locking or something like that) that could be fixed, andb) things can get messed up, and a nanoBSD style alternate partition could be quite helpful in that situation.
I simply posted a description of what went on, to provide and gather information, I didn't accuse anyone of anything.
I'm perfectly well aware that this is still beta, but after all, just because at some point the beta status is removed doesn't mean the system magically is 100% bug free after that point.
