upgrading a 6.3 box using portsnap and freebsd-update

[David Newman]

On a dual-CPU i386 box running FreeBSD 6.3, I'm having two issues with 
portsnap and freebsd-update:

1. After running "portsnap fetch" I then do "portmaster -L > 
portmaster.out" to see which ports need updating. But the output stops 
on one of the perl ports:

===>>> p5-Text-ParseWords-3.1

===>>> The textproc/p5-Text-ParseWords port has been deleted: Module 
included in
  core perl
===>>> Aborting update

Running "pkg_delete" reveals dependencies:

pkg_delete: package 'p5-Text-ParseWords-3.1' is required by these other 
packages
and may not be deinstalled:
p5-ExtUtils-ParseXS-2.19
p5-Module-Build-0.28.08_2

How to remedy?

2. freebsd-update fails to run:

mail# freebsd-update fetch
Looking up update.FreeBSD.org mirrors... none found.
Fetching public key from update.FreeBSD.org... failed.
No mirrors remaining, giving up.

Yet a FreeBSD-7.0 machine with an identical /etc/freebsd-update.conf 
file runs fine.

How to debug?

Thanks in advances for clues on fixing either or both these issues.

dn

# uname -a

FreeBSD mail.networktest.com 6.3-RELEASE-p1 FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE-p1 #1: 
Fri Feb 15 14:47:09 PST 2008 
root at mail.networktest.com:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/MYSMP  i386