How to Convert From pfsense plus 23.05 to pfsense CE 2.7

Tom here from Lauren systems and on October 25th of 2023 pfSense decided to remove the home and lab licenses that were free that they said at some point would cost $129 and they're not available anymore if you want to take your pfSense C Edition to pfSense plus now because these were available for quite a while many of you did upgrade well sometimes at my request going hey we should probably use that pfSense plus but since they changed things I'm now making a video on how to go back to pfSense C 2.7 so if you're using pfSense plus 23.0 5.1 the latest version or any of the pfSense plus versions that are prior to this I don't know what they're going to do in the future you're not running on neate Hardware because this does not affect you if you're running neate hardware and you want to move back to pfSense C 2.7 this is the video for you I wanted to make a clear path for those of you that would like to roll back so to speak well just reinstall and use C 2.7 but not have to reconfigure everything CU that's obviously a really important point I'll leave a forum link down below that is where you can find all the information on the license change and all the discussion that is ongoing on it and hey who knows maybe in the future they've changed this when you're watching this but for those of you that are just looking for a path and for myself I was out of compliance I found with my lab System since this license doesn't exist I rolled mine back to pfce and this is what that video is to show you how to do let's get [Music] started [Music] now we're logged into my virtualized environment this is nutgate pfSense plus the notice that the BIOS vendor is Zen this is our lab system now there is no more lab license as of today therefore I'm going to go ahead and revert this back to the pfSense C 2.7 first step is just going to Diagnostics and making a backup of all the configuration settings in here and this does include all the package data so we're going to download that configuration as XML next St is reloading pfSense that'll bring us back to the main menu and because I'm coming at this from the WAN side you can just run pfctl Tac D and this will allow you to disable the firewall to get back to the main Wan without having to get through the land just an easy way for the way I'm setting it up just a little Pro tip for anyone building it in a lab and would like to do this once you're back to the login screen whether you're on Wan or Lan it doesn't matter admin pfSense because remember this is a brand new clean default install and we want to restore our config we can skip the wizard and jump right over to Diagnostics backup restore choose the file and hit restore configuration now a problem I've run into sometimes is when you do this restore it does not restore the packages themselves the details of the packages are there if you manually reinstall them but because the packages are missing you can simply just restore again a second time and all the packages will just show back up and be reinstalled when it reboots a second time you will get a notice that the packages are locked depending on the speed of your internet connection because it has to download them all and how fast the system is you'll just have to wait till this gets finished on my system it only took about 3 or 4 minutes and once it's done you get a package reinstall process finished and you are ready to use pfn C with all the settings and everything copied over One Last Detail for how we do things in our lab we do anytime we have something in a virtual environment make sure we have the description that matches what it is so now this matches that it says pfce 2.7 and we let other people using the lab know it's on wport 5555 now that's all you have to do to convert back to PS sense CE or Community Edition from the pfSense plus all your settings are there just like I showed in the video it's a pretty simple process now for those of you and probably there's comments already before you got this far in the video being added of how do I convert to open sense now just because they both export XML does not mean they're 100% compatible and you just can't import that XML file from one or the other so you can't go from open sense to pfSense and you can't go from pfSense to open sense just using the XML file but XML is somewhat human read a depending on your skill level of reading it you could just take the rules and figure out how to manipulate them in there if someone knows of a converter that already does this hey reach out to me I'd be interested in talking about it because a quick search didn't yield one and it's a popular topic and popular question speaking of topics and questions head over to my forums there's a discussion link you'll find on this exact topic and I'm going to add this video to the end of it to keep the discussion going it's a great place if you know of tools or have comments and concerns around it that's a great place to engage with it because as we all know the YouTube comment system is less and wonderful speaking of that like And subscribe though it does help the YouTube algorithm to suggest more videos that are of your liking that I make and I greatly appreciated reach out to me in the forums or whatever socials you can find me on at lawren systems.com all right and [Music] thanks [Music]

Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 22,749

Keywords: LawrenceSystems, pfsense setup, pfsense (software), pfsense plus, pfsense ce vs pfsence plus, pfsense update, pfsense plus vs community edition, pfsense plus vs ce, convert pfsense plsu to CE, pfsense setup home network, network security, pfsense plus vs pfsense

Id: kFUcmWTazGg

Length: 5min 4sec (304 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2023