Fixing Stalled Package Manager in pfSense 2.4.5-p1 Easily In 5 Minutes

Introduction

Netgate updated pfSense recently to the new 2.5 branch. There are still some issues with it so I’m still running 2.4.5-p1. When I was trying to add a package I was getting an apparent hang while trying to update the list of packages from the GUI which looked like the below image.

Meanwhile in ssh’d into the console I got the following error:

Shared object "libarchive.so.7" not found, required by "pkg"

How to fix

Go into your system–>update and change the branch to 2.4.5

Next, login to ssh and run the following command using sudo or root privileges. If you don’t have the sudo package installed or otherwise can’t login as root you will need to issue the command from the web console.

sudo pkg-static install -f pkg

Since you can’t use an interactive prompt, from the web console you can run:

pkg-static install -fy pkg

The y flag will act as a yes to approve the downgrade of the package manager.

You will get

After this your pkg will work and you can install any other packages for your branch until you’re ready to upgrade to 2.5.5