Upgrading to 4.1-STABLE – things to watch out for

Upgrading to 4.1-STABLE – things to watch out for

Today I finished upgrading the freshports box to 4.1-STABLE. If you are
upgrading to 4.1, you should be aware of a potential gotcha.  During the first boot
under 4.1-STABLE, you’ll probably see this message:

Generating DSA parameter and key.

and the box will appear to hang.  Be patient. It takes some time to generate that
key. I found a message
in the mailing list
archives
which gave me my first clue.  Apparently, it takes 20 minutes on a 486.
  On my P100, it took about 10 minutes.  This delay will only occur on the first
boot.  After it successfully generates the key, subsequent boots will take the usual
length of time

Also note: the 4.1-STABLE fetch was broken.  It has since been fixed.  See 4.1-STABLE -fetch now going just fine for details on how I fixed
my box.

The rest of this article is for interest only.  If you fetch is broken, use the
above procedure to fix it.

DO NOT FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS.  See the link above for fixing
fetch.

But there is a work-around.  I’m using the fetch from 4.0-STABLE.  It does
the job.  If you want that binary, I’ve made it availble here: [sorry, this file is no longer available].
  If you get that file, you should

  1. move it file to /usr/bin
  2. cd /usr/bin
  3. mv fetch fetch.doesnotwork
  4. mv fetch.4.0-stable fetch

Then fetch should work.

Here are the symptoms of the broken fetch:

[dan@set:~] $ fetch http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/
                        x11-wm/icewm-i18n/pkg/DESCR?rev=1.2
Receiving DESCR?rev=1.2 (4294967295 bytes): 0%
258 bytes transferred in 0.0 seconds (115.10 kBps)
fetch: DESCR?rev=1.2 appears to be truncated: 258/4294967295 bytes
[dan@set:~] $ fetch -b http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/
                        x11-wm/icewm-i18n/pkg/DESCR?rev=1.2
fetch: warning: the -b option is deprecated
Receiving DESCR?rev=1.2 (4294967295 bytes): 0%
258 bytes transferred in 0.0 seconds (126.35 kBps)
fetch: DESCR?rev=1.2 appears to be truncated: 258/4294967295 bytes
[dan@set:~] $ fetch -t http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/
                        x11-wm/icewm-i18n/pkg/DESCR?rev=1.2
fetch: warning: the -t option is deprecated
Receiving DESCR?rev=1.2 (4294967295 bytes): 0%
258 bytes transferred in 0.0 seconds (122.37 kBps)
fetch: DESCR?rev=1.2 appears to be truncated: 258/4294967295 bytes

The upgrade process

Do you remember that makefile I had for my upgrade
from FreeBSD 4.0-Release to FreeBSD 4.0-Stable
. Well, gill wrote in with an
improvement. It doesn’t make things any faster. It just makes the script easier to
configure. I’ve updated the old script with his changes and the script is available here.

That’s the script I used for my upgrade.  It
went just fine.  Apart from the problem noted above.  I’d recommend holding off
on your upgrade.

Leave a Comment

Scroll to Top