I made a post about this on our forums (first post on the forums actually haha) but decided I needed to make a front page post. Please save yourselves the heart ache and grief and just read the damn release notes before you upgrade firmware versions. Technician friend of mine apparently doesn’t like reading too much. Either way, he took a firewall straight to 5,4,1 from an unsupported firmware upgrade path. Yeah, I know, 5.4.1, too early for production, I get that….but the issues he is experiencing are due to his lack of release note reading.
So PLEASE save yourself the trouble and pain and just read and follow the release notes!
Regarding the “too early for production” thing; how early is too early in your opinion? I manage a few big FGs here in Norway and was under the impression (coming from Cisco) that GA is plenty good enough. Leaned the hard way when I used 5.4.0. I still deal with some minor bugs now 5.4.2 and 5.4.3.
In your experience, how long should I wait to move onto new releases? Like you, I’m very looking forward to 5.6. How many minor updates after GA would you wait before giving 5.6 a shot?
I tend to be……overzealous. This means I tend to push to the latest and greatest as soon as possible, issues be damned.
I wouldn’t touch 5.6 GA though unless it is a home or test unit. I would wait until 5.1 so they can get mass found bugs out of the way. No matter how hard they beta test it they won’t see the variation in device/configuration combinations until they move it to GA for the masses. Which means they wont know of the big ugly bugs that are hidden in plain sight until then either.
Thanks for replying! Was happy to have found your site 🙂 Please keep us posted with your findings on 5.6