Feature #14008
open
Change upgrade/reboot countdown timer to a general "busy" indicator
Added by Steve Y almost 2 years ago.
Updated almost 2 years ago.
Description
Newcomers to pfSense may assume the 2 minute timer suggests that is how long the upgrade is expected to take. Since upgrades nowadays often take 10-20 minutes, especially on slower storage, they may easily assume something has gone wrong, reboot, and end up with a half-upgraded device.
Suggestion: have the timer start at 15 minutes but still check in the background. If the upgrade finishes "early," great. If not then at least the admin will wait 15 minutes and have a better chance of success. Bonus points: use 15 minutes on eMMC, less on SSD.
ref: https://forum.netgate.com/topic/178131/xg7100-upgrade-fails/8
- Subject changed from Lengthen default timer on upgrades to Change upgrade/reboot countdown timer to a general "busy" indicator
It's a good idea since that varies a lot by hardware but it's all a guess. I'm not even sure why we need a visible timer here since it just resets and keeps checking once it runs out. It's all in JS so it's not even a proper indicator of whether or not the firewall is responding.
So we could probably eliminate the countdown entirely and replace it with some other kind of animated "busy" indicator and keep probing periodically in the background either way.
Brainstorming it the other direction, perhaps after "n" minutes show a message to check the console, or after a while show "if the LEDs on your router are _ connect to the console, otherwise wait" (that's only applicable to Netgate hardware of course). (actually checking the console ought to add more wait time for most people!)
To add to the conversation, as a relative newcomer to Netgate/pfSense, the fact that there is a 2 minute timer implies that the firewall is expected to be "ready" in 2ish minutes. Yesterday I updated my XG7100 to 23.01 and almost 20 minutes of watching the firewall report "Not ready, retrying in 20 seconds" made me think that there was a problem and the firewall was somehow "stuck." Since I didn't find any instructions regarding that issue, I chose to reboot through the console, which I now know can result in an incomplete upgrade. I plan to reload now just to insure that everything is okay even though I haven't seen any issues yet. For the sake of answering the questions that may be asked, I did reboot prior to the upgrade, and I made a backup both before and after the reboot. I also created a boot environment just in case.
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