freebsd-update <bleep>

[Paul Mather]

On Dec 8, 2016, at 4:13 PM, Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> wrote:

> Basic symptom:
> 
>    #  /usr/sbin/freebsd-update fetch
>    Looking up update.FreeBSD.org mirrors... none found.
>    Fetching metadata signature for 10.3-STABLE from update.FreeBSD.org... failed.
>    No mirrors remaining, giving up.


I had this problem a while ago.  In my case, it turned out that my upstream DNS was filtering out SRV requests, which breaks freebsd-update mirror handling.  My upstream DNS was via an OpenWRT box.  According to their documentation (https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/dhcp.dnsmasq) in the "SIP-Phones and dnsmasq" section they say, "By default, the option filterwin2k in dnsmasq is activated, which seems to cause to block queries for SRV records."  True enough, disabling "filterwin2k" in /etc/config/dhcp "fixed" my problem.

I don't know if this is related to your problem, but in my case I wasn't getting *any* SRV records returned for _http._tcp.update.FreeBSD.org... :-(

I believe freebsd-update falls back to a standard server if no mirrors can be enumerated, but this server tends to get overloaded when security advisories come out (at least that was my experience when I had the SRV records problem) and so freebsd-update can fail.

Cheers,

Paul.