Reinstalling pfSense Plus Software

  1. Please open a TAC ticket to request access to the Plus firmware by selecting Firmware Access as the General Problem and then select Netgate 7100 Desktop for the platform. Make sure to include the serial number in the ticket to expedite access.

    Once the ticket is processed, the latest stable version of the firmware will be attached to the ticket, with a name such as:

    pfSense-plus-memstick-serial-23.09.1-RELEASE-amd64.img.gz

    Note

    pfSense® Plus is preinstalled on Netgate appliances, which is optimally tuned for Netgate hardware and contains features that cannot be found elsewhere, such as ZFS Boot Environments, OpenVPN DCO, and the AWS VPC Wizard.

  2. Write the image to a USB memstick. Locating the image and writing it to a USB memstick is covered in detail under Writing Flash Drives.

  3. Connect to the console port of the Netgate device.

  4. Insert the memstick into an open USB port and boot the device.

  5. After a minute the pfSense® Plus loader menu will be displayed with a 3 second timer. Either allow the menu to timeout or press 1 (the default) to continue.

    ../_images/pfsense-reinstall-1.png

  6. Console options are presented for serial console installation. The default option is vt100, which should work for most. Choose the correct console output most compatible with the serial client.

    Please choose the appropriate terminal type for your system.
Common console types are:
   ansi     Standard ANSI terminal
   vt100    VT100 or compatible terminal
   xterm    xterm terminal emulator (or compatible)
   cons25w  cons25w terminal

  7. The installer will automatically launch and several options will be presented. On Netgate appliances, choosing Enter for the default options will complete the installation process.

    Note

    Options such as the type of disk partition can be modified through this installation if required.

    See also

    For more information on the available choices during this process, see the Installation Walkthrough.

  8. Once the installer is finished, choose No and press Enter to skip going to a shell.

  9. The installer will then prompt to Reboot. Select Reboot and press Enter. The device will shutdown and reboot.

    Dec 21 22:41:37 Waiting (max 60 seconds) for system process `vnlru` to stop... done
Waiting (max 60 seconds) for system process `bufdaemon` to stop... done
Waiting (max 60 seconds) for system process `syncer` to stop...
Syncing disks, vnodes remaining... 0 0 done
All buffers synced.
Uptime: 5m43s
umass0: detached
umass1: detached
uhub1: detached

  10. Remove the USB drive from the USB port.

    Important

    If the USB drive remains attached, the system will boot into the installer again because by default the system firmware is configured so that a device plugged into the USB port will be booted with a higher priority.

See also

For information on restoring from a previously saved configuration, go to Backup and Restore.

Caution

If this device contains multiple disks, such as when adding an SSD to an existing system which previously used MMC, additional steps may be necessary to ensure the device boots from and uses the correct disk. Furthermore, having separate installations of the software on different disks is a known source of problems. For example, the kernel could boot from one disk while the root filesystem is loaded from another, or they could contain conflicting ZFS pools.

In some cases it is possible to adjust the BIOS boot order to prefer the new disk, but the best practice is to wipe the old disk to remove any chance of the previous installation causing boot issues or conflicts.

For information on how to wipe the old disk, see Multiple Disk Boot Issues.