pfSense

Applied in changeset 1e4911dcb05d66e84dbc21047435b2abb44377ac.

I was getting the error only when manually added sshdata tags in the following order:

<sshdata>
</sshdata>

The fix works fine since it should never be formatted that way in pfSense.

I am marking this ticket resolved.

There is still some issue here as users are hitting this on 22.05 when restoring backups with two sections.

I see a couple problems here. One, code that removed duplicate sections on backup (#10508) got unintentionally removed at some point. Two, when restoring it doesn't also check for duplicate data sections, only for empty tags. If there are two populated data sections that will still fail.

I have fixes for both that seem to work with whatever I've thrown at them so far. I need to run some more tests yet but I should have a fix committed soon.

Fixed by 6600b09f72ca2fddfaae0f834b211689c3d32655

I updated a virtual machine from 2.6 to 2.7.0.a.20221202.0600 and took a snapshot.
- SSH is enabled and the default admin user has a key in System > User Manager ... Authorized SSH Keys.
- Backups were of course taken with Skip RDD Data unchecked.

I wasn't able make the live file method work. After adding the junk sshdata section to the bottom of the live /conf/config.xml and running rm /tmp/config.cache , I then couldn't access any page on the GUI, including the dashboard because of PHP errors. Had to remove the duplicate sshdata or rdddata tags in the console shell to do anything further, and back at the Dashboard was a crash report to download. The sshdata report is the attached file, which is better formatted than pasting here what was shown in the browser window (same contents).

I restored to the 2.7 machine snapshot, blanked the admin's SSH key in the GUI, and took a config backup.

- Added the junk sshdata tags to the very bottom of the configuration file and was able to restore with no problems. The correct SSH key was back in the window on the admin user's settings. For both sshdata and rdddata, the junk sshdata and empty rdddata tags I created were removed in subsequent backups I took.

- Adding the junk sshdata above the valid one made no difference. The configuration restored successfully and the junk section was removed from the file.

- Duplicating the valid sshdata section in the configuration file four times also had no effect. Successful restore and reboot, and duplicates were removed.

That should be sufficient testing.

The "live" method can be done if you are logged in and sitting at the backup page already and just click the backup button after making the modifications, but it's not as important. As you can tell it's unlikely anyone would be in that situation since nothing would be functional. Adding just one of the junk/extra sections at a time would work, though.

Updating subject for release notes.