[nycbug-talk] pfsense and tor

[George Rosamond]

fastgoldfish at gmail.com:
> There is a bug in pfSense. I haven't figured out how to report it yet,
> but here's the one-liner command I used to fix it:
> 
> setenv PACKAGESITE
> ftp://ftp-archive.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-Archive/ports/i386/packages-8.1-release/Latest/
> 
> Then you can run pkg_add normally, like this:
> 
> pkg_add -r tor
> 
> or even better:
> 
> pkg_add -v -r tor
> 
> The problem was that there are no packages for FreeBSD 8.1 in the
> usual location where we would expect to find them, and where pfSense
> looks and fails to retrieve the Tor package. You can see for yourself
> that there's nothing for 8.1:
> 
> ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/
> 
> I did some looking around, and I found 8.1's packages here;
> 
> ftp://ftp-archive.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-Archive/ports/i386/packages-8.1-release/Latest/
> 
> So, to make pkg_add look there instead, I just did this (which I
> mentioned at the beginning of this post):
> 
> setenv PACKAGESITE
> ftp://ftp-archive.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-Archive/ports/i386/packages-8.1-release/Latest/
> 
> I'm surprised such a fundamental problem hasn't been noticed before.
> Maybe it has been noticed before, but there's no way to report the
> bug, and so nobody bothered to fix it. That meant that only the
> experienced users would be able to solve the problems themselves, and
> newcomers like me would have to debug it and come up with a solution
> from scratch. Voila! :)

Manually installing packages isn't a normal function for pfSense.  They
make it clear that it's unsupported in the documentation.

And yes, at this point, FreeBSD doesn't keep packages synchronized with
ports, but that should be changing in the (nearer) future.

Also, if you go through the pfSense documentation, they explain finding
the packages based on the pfSense version of FreeBSD you are using.

But again, it's not a bug since it's not a supported feature.

g