Being a big fan of pfSense firewall I have it deployed wherever I had chance to put it. Recently I was updating an installation of 1.2.3 to 2.0 in one of the offices so that I can get proper NAT reflection and many other nice things added in 2.0, I also remembered that I have another installation in one of the places I maintain, so I thought to check if I can update that place as well.
While the update from 1.2.3 to 2.0 is pretty easy: just uninstall all plugins, do automatic update through web interface and then reinstall all the plugins back (all configuration remains and all works well, at least for me), the version of pfSense in old office I had was 1.0b2 (dated 2006 or somewhere there). The 1.0b2 does not support automatic updates against current pfSense auto update servers, so I had to do it through manual upload of firmware files.
Getting around pfSense mirrors I found few firmware files that I can try to do incremental update, since I didn’t want to go strait from 1.0b2 to 2.0 (too big step).
Finally I decided on the following path: 1.0b2 – 1.0.1 – 1.2 – 1.2.3 – 2.0. Until 1.2.3 I had to upload firmware files as autoupdate was not in place. Each reboot after upgrade I was waiting for my firewall to come up, I had some doubts that all when fine, but each time everything went fine. After putting 1.2.3 I could do automatic update, which also went pretty fine. Finally I reinstalled all the plugins (only few like squid, squidguard, lightsquid reporting and ntop).
The thing that surprised me during the upgrade is that I did a step from 1.0b2 (year 2006) to 2.0 (2011) through web interface, while seating at home on my WiFi with SSH tunnel to one of the servers in the office and port forwarding to access firewall’s web interface. In most of the cases, the SSH connection was running across reboots of firewall and I didn’t need to reconnect at all, nor I had to relogin to web GUI. The whole upgrade took me around 2 hours (since I had to download firmware files on my laptop and then upload them to firewall using my browser)
Impressive! Very good job by all who are involved in pfSense! Now I am even more convinced that pfSense is a number one solution for all my firewall needs!