Just a word of caution before you do this. Be prepared for some issues. I watched Tom’s video about upgrading and made sure I downloaded the ISO ahead of time (of course, that turned out to not be the exact one I needed). I also did a BACKUP of my pfsense config (always do that). Furthermore, I DID NOT upgrade the pfsense packages (pfblocker, avahi, etc) first per Tom’s suggestion. So I thought I was doing everything right, but the upgrade still failed.
It SEEMED to work AOK, but sat on the screen waiting for the system to reboot and kept saying “not ready yet, trying again in 20 seconds” or something like that. After >30 mins of waiting I was pretty sure it wasn’t coming back. I opened a ticket with support. They gave me a private link to download a recovery image for the 3100 (not the same as the link on their public page, unless I’m missing something). Had to flash a USB, no issue there. Had to also install a USB driver to get console access to the 3100 via a USB MINI cable (had the cable, make sure you have one ahead of time). Since I had never done this, I had a lot of tweaking to do to my terminal (Mac) default settings to get it to see the console without garbled text. Oh boy, what a fun Saturday morning this was.
The first attempt to “run recovery” failed. That made me worry. At that point I rebooted the device (not much else to do at that point) and it automatically retried the upgrade from the USB. Apparently the second time was the charm. All seems to be OK now, my blood pressure is slowly returning to normal.
Not exaclty the smooth upgrade process I should have expected with a Netgate appliance. Pretty disappointed with that and it will make me worry with future upgrades. I must say, though, that Netgate support was great. They were really quick to respond to my ticket (this is all online, no phone support) so that was great and my hats off to them.
Anyway, I hope your upgrades go more smoothly than mine.But I thought I would share my experience and let you know how I ultimately fixed it.
