pfSense CE has broken package manager on Azure
How to fix a broken package manager on pfSense CE running in Azure
The Scenario
I was trying to save some money by replacing my Azure VPN Gateways with a free alternative. I saw the pfSense Plus VM in the marketplace, but they wanted ~$35/mo + Azure compute costs to run it. That's $10/mo more expensive than the VPN gateway without compute factored in. I started looking at how I could run the Community Edition (free) on Azure. There are several good tutorials on doing this and I won't cover it here.
The issue
What I want to address today is a "quirk" with the package manager when you run the VM on Azure. The issue presents as the update manager being blank and the package manager generating an error. If you try to manually run the commands or check the logs, you see this error:
cp: /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/pfSense.conf: No such file or directory
It seems that something in the package wrapper script provided by Netgate wipes out the config. I won't speculate on why it does this, but Netgate says pfSense Plus has "enhancements" for Azure.
The fix
To fix the issue if you have a broken pfSense CE install in Azure, run the commands below:
cp /usr/local/share/pfSense/pkg/repos/pfSense-repo.conf /usr/local/etc/pfSense/pkg/repos/pfSense-repo-2.7.2.conf
cp /usr/local/share/pfSense/pkg/repos/pfSense-repo.conf.default /usr/local/etc/pfSense/pkg/repos/pfSense-repo-2.7.2.default
cp /usr/local/share/pfSense/pkg/repos/pfSense-repo.descr /usr/local/etc/pfSense/pkg/repos/pfSense-repo-2.7.2.descr
echo '2.7.2' > /usr/local/etc/pfSense/pkg/repos/pfSense-repo-2.7.2.name
mv /usr/local/sbin/pfSense-repoc /usr/local/sbin/pfSense-repoc.orig
mv /usr/local/sbin/pfSense-repoc-static /usr/local/sbin/pfSense-repoc.oric-static.orig
touch /usr/local/sbin/pfSense-repoc
chmod +x /usr/local/sbin/pfSense-repoc
cp /usr/local/sbin/pfSense-repoc /usr/local/sbin/pfSense-repoc-staticYou can run these commands individually from Diagnostics->Command Prompt section of the WebConfigurator. It basically disables the pfSense-reproc script that seems to cause the issue and restores the repo config.
Source
The script above comes from this post on the Netgate forums. All credit goes to the commenter in that thread who figured this out.
McNubblet