Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2018 13:51:59 -0500 From: Scott Ballantyne <boyvalue@gmail.com> To: FreeBSD <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Upgrade to 11.2 failure Message-ID: <CAESeg0wTzdnatF0BNynCUTLXgN0wcke-=j8DMR8NTo%2BY05LPHQ@mail.gmail.com>
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Ok, this is here as a cautionary tale, not as flamebait. Let me preface this by saying I've been a FreeBSD user for 20+ years and this is the very first time I've had this experience. Up until today, I have been a very happy FreeBSD user with my home and several remote systems running flawlessly. First, all praise to the freebsd ZFS team. Without their solid work, I would be in really deep trouble at the moment. If you read my earlier message, you know that this all started when I tried to upgrade firefox. That hosed the GUI and so now I have to ssh to the box. I'm running 10.4, so the obvious thing to do (which a few people pointed out) was to upgrade to 11.2 or 12.x. I've used FreeBSD-update many times, no problems. So I proceeded to do this. All went as expected until the pkg-static upgrade -f step, which core dumped. i ran a debugger on it, but it is compiled with no symbols, so I can't give much more detail. Out of curiosity, I ran pkg-static to update my emacs. That identified hundreds of binaries whose ABI had changed, so I updated those. pkg-static upgrade -f still seg faulted after that, so I tried pkg-static autoremove after which it updated a few files. I finished with the required final run of freebsd-install and rebooted. Now I couldn't login at all. The system wasn't recognizing my credentials. I booted to single-user, thinking that perhaps I had made an error in editing the password files during the merge, but they were fine. I also discovered that even after the apparently successful runs of freebsd-install and pkg-static upgrade -f that there was software on the system that couldn't find the proper libraries to run. This was obviously a disaster. Fortunately, I had taken zfs snapshots of the filesystems prior to the upgrade and was able to roll things back to the point where only the GUI was hosed. So once again, thanks are due to the creators and porters of ZFS. Obviously, many people have succeeded in doing this and perhaps I made some error, although, as I have said I have done this many, many times. It does seem that the freebsd-update/pkg system is more fragile than I have thought. This isn't a big deal for the stuff I have at homes, but I have come to rely on this combo to update systems to which I don't have physical access. Now I am a bit concerned about doing that. When I have more time, I will go back to my older method of building the system from source. But for now this will have to do. Thanks for reading :) Scott
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