pfSense » pfSense Docs

Documentation is here:
https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/install/download-installer-image.html#verifying-the-integrity-of-the-download

Currently, customers repeatedly misunderstand that they should simply open the contents of the .sha256 file in something like a text editor and continually will make the error of running sha256sum (or the operating system equivalent command) on both files. They are then confused why they don't match and assume that the file is corrupt when it is not. We currently get tickets about this several times a month.

We should probably add some specific command like "cat file.sha256" on Linux to just spit out the file contents, since people seemingly just skip right over the word "contents". This obviously doesn't apply to OpenHashTab, which can take the contents of the .sha256 file and compare it automatically, but Linux and macOS users seem to struggle with this.