Re: Corruption for etc/pam.d/ftpd when running etcupdate for 14.3 to 15.0

From: Sad Clouds <cryintothebluesky_at_gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2026 08:39:48 UTC 
On Sun, 4 Jan 2026 14:38:21 +0000
Sad Clouds <cryintothebluesky@gmail.com> wrote:

> After the above steps I end up with broken /mnt/etc/pam.d/ftpd. The
> original file from 14.3 in /etc/pam.d/ftpd was never even modified.
> 

If anyone is interested, I had more time this morning to look into this
issue and the root cause seems to be etcupdate is not able to cope with
hard links:

ls -li /etc/pam.d/ftp*
21415 -rw-r--r--  2 root wheel 347 Jun  6  2025 /etc/pam.d/ftp
21415 -rw-r--r--  2 root wheel 347 Jun  6  2025 /etc/pam.d/ftpd

This results in corrupt updates for some of those files. I'm not sure
for how long this issue existed. It appears on FreeBSD-15.X the above
files are no longer hard links.

One way to work around it: prior to running etcupdate, remove hard
links on FreeBSD-14.X

rm /etc/pam.d/ftp
cp -a /etc/pam.d/ftpd /etc/pam.d/ftp

rm /var/db/etcupdate/current/etc/pam.d/ftp
cp -a /var/db/etcupdate/current/etc/pam.d/ftpd /var/db/etcupdate/current/etc/pam.d/ftp