pfSense » pfSense Plus

Since updating to 26.03 from 25.11.1, I now get the error below on my dashboard at every boot:

"check_upgrade: "Updating repositories metadata" returned error code 1"

This was originally reported here: https://forum.netgate.com/topic/200209 but that discussion was moved to a private chat with Marcos M (marcosm). After a few eeks of back and forth, I reached a conclusion that this is somehow caused by the Tailscale package. When Tailscale is disabled or removed, the error does not occur.

Looking at the logs, it seems like this is caused by Tailscale stopping and starting rapidly a few times during the boot process (which seems odd). It appears that whenever this is done, it briefly interrupts connectivity and/or restarts services. This seems to happen during a sensitive time window of the boot process, right around when the pkg metadata is being fetched.

I tried updating tailscale to v1.96.4 (pkg add -f https://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:16:amd64/latest/All/tailscale-1.96.4.pkg) but that did not have any effect. I also tested disabling the Python Unbound module, which also did not have any effect.

I have what I'd consider a setup of "mid-level" complexity:

• Netgate 6100
• (1) Hurricane Electric 6in4 tunnel for IPv6 since my ISP (Verizon Fios) does not provide native v6
• (1) Site-to-site Wireguard tunnel to a work datacenter
• (1) Unbound Python module that filters out AAAA responses to avoid traffic naturally preferring to flow over the slow HENET tunnel
• Multi-WAN, primary is a 2GBit FIOS (dyn IP) and backup is a mobile 4G router with Ethernet
• A few VLANs (main, storage, IoT, guest, DMZ)

Packages installed:

• acme
• ANDwatch
• arping
• Cron
• Filer
• iperf
• mDNS-Bridge
• Netgate_Firmware_Upgrade
• Nexus
• Shellcmd
• sudo
• System_Patches
• Tailscale
• WireGuard

Happy to provide any debug logs, /verbose_rc output, /status.php dumps or any other info requested. I have sent Marcos some private gists with debug logs from our troubleshooting session, so hopefully I don't need to link those here.