 Time here from our systems. It is January 16th of 2023 PF sense plus release candidate 2301 is available. Well, it wasn't available just today It's been available for a little while, but I did load it three days ago on my system here at my office slash studio Now this is separate than my business office That's still running the current stable version But I wanted to share my experience in the upgrade process and I did a few lab machines which went boringly smooth I mean Changes and breaking things is more exciting which I had a little bit more exciting upgrade doing it with my system Which the real difference is I was running snort and end top I just removed those packages and did the upgrade again and no problems I say again because I've done a video on boot environments linked down in the description below and what you do So you can be at the minimal amount of risk here of disruption and problems or you know Having a reload of firewall, which is just pain in a but but you go and set up a boot environment You run the upgrade process and if it doesn't go well because you've forgot to remove snort or end top PNG I was hoping it didn't have to but these settings all came back after I reinstalled them But that broke so all I do was roll back to a previous boot environment remove those two packages run that process again Worked perfectly fine. And here we are making a video now And well this video is being made and uploaded through a 2301 firewall So let's dive into some of the changes and things that are really different or not so different about the 2301 I'll be leaving a link to this down below so you can read through all the feature changes But the big major ones we want to talk about here is first the refactoring from 7.4 to 8.1 PHP this is well important because PHP 7.4 has reached end of life as of here today It is no longer supported therefore if there's a security problem found in that old version of PHP You're not likely to get an update or a patch for it. It's a big maybe because as I said, it's unsupported now One problem is when you move from PHP versions There's new ways to do things this code improves and there may be some deprecated functions And that's a lot of testing to do so that's a lot of the under-the-hood changes that occurred with this version So it's not just the PF sense system itself But it's also any of the packages that may have dependencies or problems running the older versions of PHP The next thing is they went from free BSD 12 all the way up to free BSD 14 Now there's a lot of good reasons for doing this You're getting the latest kernel and you may not know this but people that work at Nekate are also code contributors Not just to pfSense, but they're also co-conservating to BSD project itself Those upstream commits are going most likely into the latest kernel And if you're running a older version of free BSD There is some extra labor involved in bringing that code back into the older kernel This will kind of relieve them of some of that technical debt And as they push upstream updates and changes to the BSD project and they can pull that back down into pfSense but you remember pfSense is built as a distribution that is Appliance-like as in single tasks focused on being a firewall and the features that they put in it So you're not really at risk from running the latest packages because it's not like a full BSD distribution Where you're just pulling from any package because there's been maybe some people concerned if you're running They'll bleeding edge of all this with that causing the instability And of course you have the people who are writing kernel stuff pulling the kernel in and packaging this to be a Extremely stable firewall. So I think it's really cool that they brought this all the way to free BSD 14 This allows them to pull data in faster I believe and you know keep the iterations going when there's changes or updates that need to come to this now of note 2.7 community edition is also doing these same things moving to the 7.4 8.1 and moving to free BSD 14 I'm talking about plus because that's what I'm using and I mentioned a boot environment So I did test this with 2.7 and so there's a lot of parity here in terms of the base operating system being the same I've talked about this before where pfSense plus is still Essentially built on top of your pfSense community edition. So they share a common base But the pfSense plus does have some extra things that are listed in a video also down below So you can see the difference between them such as the boot environments and a couple extra features that they add on on top of it Now this is my system here at the studio. It is the 231 beta It has been running for four days four hours 32 minutes because that's how long ago I updated it I figured four days is enough to do some testing to see if I would run into any problems of things that didn't work Things that are working fine are my privacy VPN right here my WireGuard VPN to the office which you can see has moved about 17 gigs of data In receive and transmitted at 1.53 gigs. So that's worked perfectly fine I loaded HAProxy on here just to see if it would load to see if there's any issues because it is a newer version slightly I didn't set this up yet to do any testing we use HAProxy at my office, but I haven't really dove into it I do have some future videos I'm working on and I'll probably do those here on this system But it does load and didn't have any errors the air services and money are snort and snort works perfectly fine Didn't have any problems there and the final one is going to be under firewall and of course PF blocker NG No errors no trouble running this extension here So the common ones that you see a lot of people running Also worth noting that I have plenty of different networks in here lots of different interfaces and firewall rules and No issues moving things around between any of these now My reason really for making this video is to share with you the changes that are coming in the new version of PF Sense whether that be the 2.7 community edition or the 2.3.0 1 but specifically I am testing the PF Sense plus 2.3.0 1 now I'm curious what your experiences are why you have or have not upgraded to the latest version if there's challenges you have just well Put them in the comments below or more importantly if you can reproduce a specific problem let the developers know That's how these problems get fixed is through proper testing and evaluating and seeing if there's some Reproducible bug that occurs that well can be squashed so this can get to full release faster Obviously, I don't know or have a crystal ball that tells me when the full release date is But as we can see with PF Sense they are getting close because well once there's a lot of bugs quash Or there's not many or many bugs left to quash I should say it's probably we can speculate really close to coming to full release now before it comes before release Maybe I'll do some testing on my office because I also am using HA proxy and acne and a few other things there With radius server and I want to test to make sure all those function work And I can also use the boot environments to test even that larger environment like that Which as I said with the video link down below kind of reduces all of your risk for doing any of this So let me know what your thoughts are in the comments down below if you're having problems Netgate forums is a great place to discuss that if you want to discuss topics You've seen on this channel or reach out to me My forums are a great place to engage or reach out of me or any of the socials that I've mentioned Down in the links below. 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