 Tom here from morning systems and the system patches package to patch pfSense and specifically we're talking about pfSense plus but this is also available in pfSense CE has been updated and this is a pretty cool tool. I literally like this package because it allows developers and especially when you're working with them in the forums because you found some type of edge case they're able to test things or even if you're a developer yourself you're able to apply code changes not by going to the command line and actually editing the files but by applying them as a patch and easily making them revertible and this rewrite of the patch system in 2301 is pretty slick it just got released the other day and I like it because it makes applying all the patches a lot easier when you're not sure whether or not you're affected by bugs or maybe you don't have time to sort out which bugs or which patches to apply this will group them all together and let you apply them all or revert them one by one or revert them all whatever works for you so it's pretty simple and let's jump over to pfSense to take a look at how it works now I'm first going to leave you a link to the netgate forums where there's an active ongoing discussion because this was just released a couple days ago so maybe you have questions in the best place to engage with the netgate developers about this particular package or all things pfSense is in their forums now I'm running the latest version of pfSense plus 2301 the package actually has been available for a long time and it's still available in both ce and plus the enhancements though that I know of right now are only in plus they're coming to ce when ce hits 2.7 they'll have something similar but that's not out yet I know they're working on community edition soon but you can definitely download and try it if you want over to here is the package manager now I'm mentioning this just so you know where do you install it so we have the installed packages versus available packages and we'll scroll down here and we look for system patches to make sure it's installed once you know it's installed you can go back up to system and go over to your patches now the new thing is not the patch system because you've always been able to add a new patch for many versions but it's the ease at which you can do it by applying all or reverting all or reverting them one by one so let's go ahead and hit revert recommended hit okay I've already applied them and we can go say let's apply this patch or this patch or this patch and you can kind of go through and choose which ones you want or I'm going to apply all recommended patches now it does warn you for any one of these if a reboot is required it's not disruptive to apply them or remove them some of them though may not activate until a rule reload or a reboot of the system and as I said each one is noted and if you're wondering if I'm running up 30 100 because it says recommended and we do see one for the 3100 here and we can also revert this if I didn't want to apply it applying this to a non 3100 for example will not break your system this patching system is aware of the version you're running and is not going to apply things that would break your system or your use case so even though this one doesn't affect me it won't hurt me either now you can take any of these particular patches and for example disable send file in engine x what does that look like what is the code differences we can hit view and we can say okay the plus and minus send file on versus send file off so you can see just the nuances for any one of these patches or what was the 3100 patch we can hit view and you're seeing exactly what code has been changed so you can look at the pluses minuses just doing a normal diff to compare the difference between these now they still have the other patching where you can put in a description and your own patch contents or a URL or commit ID so it will pull and put in the patch for you as long as it works with your version or if you're a developer you can start putting your own code in here like I said this is a lot handier than trying to manually go through and patch and test things because we can apply it and then remove it if we put something in that we didn't want now if you're wondering if you should load it even if you're not having problems I'm not having problems and I chose to load it and the reason why is because I may run into a complicated problem or something that runs into the need for one of these patches later and this will just save me some trouble of doing it because all of these are bug fixes that are usually targeted for the next release they're just bringing them back into this release so it's not any reason I can think of not to load those patches unless you course you run into a stability problem where you loaded it and it did break something but that's why there's an easy revert if there's any issues but I've loaded this on several systems and then I made this video because well I wanted to make sure I didn't see any issues with it and so far I have found none I've did our production systems I did my studio system was just technically production and I did some lab systems and played around with different things and didn't find any problems so nonetheless that's why I'm recommending this leave your thoughts and comments down below or head over to the neck gate forum post I link down below to have an engaging discussion with the developers over there or head over to my forums to talk about well whatever you want to talk about with me that's the easiest place to reach me if you have some questions comments and concerns as always thanks