Good day,
Last night I made the mistake of trying to upgrade my system. I moved from 25.7 to the suggested 26.1 using the GUI. Upon reboot, the first thing I noticed was that all of my WiFi nodes were showing offline lights, even though some WiFi devices could still browse fine. None of my laptops could access the internet (limited connectivity notice), but a WiFi-only tablet was connected and browsing still. I could no longer access the OPNSense GUI, except on a few small screen devices, which made troubleshooting nearly impossible. Some things worked, some things didn't.
On OPNSense itself, the live logs showed traffic passing, I saw no errors if I rebooted the system, but the internet was completely in shambles. I tried re-running upgrades from the shell in case something hadn't completed properly, no luck. If I accessed the GUI from the one working tablet, I saw nothing resembling my old DHCP leases, etc... so I assume this was being caused by changes from ISC DHCP. No idea, so I went into recovery mode.
I made a bootable USB with 25.7, and used the configuration importer to use the backup before the upgrade, and boom. Everything came back online. So now I'm back on 25.7, but I have a new problem. I have some conflicting plugins which showed an error. When I tried to reinstall them, I got an error saying I had to upgrade to the version that broke everything in order to reinstall those plugins.
Screenshot_20260325_120405.png
With nothing else to try, I deregistered them, but I have this list that I need to recover.
Screenshot_20260325_022753.png
At this point, I need to first get my system back to where it was.
1. How can I get these plugins corrected and reinstalled?
2. What likely happened, and why?
3. How can I get back in business now that I know upgrading will break everything?
When I tried to upgrade again (before deregistering missing plugins), I got an "unknown error" and the upgrade to 26.1 simply failed. I restored to 25.7 again, and all is back. I haven't tried upgrading again since deregistering the plugins. So right now, I'm left with a slightly broken 25.7 install I need to fix. I have alias', rules around those alias', on a system with WAN and four separate subnets (LAN, OPT1, OPT2) using a four port NIC. A fair amount of rules... All works fine until the upgrade happens.
Any recommendations of where to start with this mess?
Thanks!
Quote from: House Of Cards on Today at 05:37:01 PMLast night I made the mistake of trying to upgrade my system.
Upgrading is not the mistake. Lack of recovery methods is.
Next time, use snapshots (https://docs.opnsense.org/manual/snapshots.html) at least.
> Any recommendations of where to start with this mess?
Start by updating 25.7. When check for updates again and your OPN plugins will be restored. For mimugmail you'll need to add the repo again.
When 25.7 is back up, take a snapshot. Then upgrade to the latest 26.1 ( so upgrade twice )
We can discuss 26.1 issues when/if you have the same bad outcome coming up to 26.1.5.
Anything else that happened in the past is pure speculation but it all boils down to user error for me - no proper troubleshooting, not asking for help on the forums, no snapshots and nuking everything and starting over from an older version than necessary-when 26.1 would have been enough.