I work at Microsoft, and with that, I get free Azure credits.
Considering where I work, I have no use for FreeBSD at work, only Windows. However, I spent seven years of my life prior to getting $DAYJOB using FreeBSD, going back to high school and basically built my personal setup on it. I haven’t bothered to switch my personal desktop or home server to Windows (yet*), so I’ll create a FreeBSD VM in Azure and try to update it.
If I create a FreeBSD VM in Azure and update, I get pkg errors as follows:
root@Inst1:/usr/home/neel # pkg upgrade
Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue...
Fetching meta.txz: 100% 916 B 0.9kB/s 00:01
pkg: repository meta /var/db/pkg/FreeBSD.meta has wrong version 2
repository FreeBSD has no meta file, using default settings
Fetching packagesite.txz: 100% 6 MiB 6.5MB/s 00:01
pkg: repository meta /var/db/pkg/FreeBSD.meta has wrong version 2
pkg: Repository FreeBSD load error: meta cannot be loaded No error: 0
Unable to open created repository FreeBSD
Unable to update repository FreeBSD
Error updating repositories!
root@Inst1:/usr/home/neel #
To fix, this you need to re-bootstrap pkg as follows:
root@Inst1:/usr/home/neel # pkg-static bootstrap -f
pkg(8) is already installed. Forcing reinstallation through pkg(7).
The package management tool is not yet installed on your system.
Do you want to fetch and install it now? [y/N]: y
Bootstrapping pkg from pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/FreeBSD:12:amd64/quarterly, please wait...
Verifying signature with trusted certificate pkg.freebsd.org.2013102301... done
Installing pkg-1.13.2...
package pkg is already installed, forced install
Extracting pkg-1.13.2: 100%
root@Inst1:/usr/home/neel #
And then update as normal:
root@Inst1:/usr/home/neel # pkg update -f
Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue...
Fetching meta.conf: 100% 163 B 0.2kB/s 00:01
Fetching packagesite.txz: 100% 6 MiB 3.3MB/s 00:02
Processing entries: 100%
FreeBSD repository update completed. 31517 packages processed.
All repositories are up to date.
root@Inst1:/usr/home/neel # pkg upgrade
Updaing FreeBSD repository catalogue...
FreeBSD repository is up to date.
All repositories are up to date.
...
Proceed with this action? [y/N]: y
...
I do recommend updating to a non-EOL release first, as the Azure images may be out of date, as they are for 12.x.
At the time of writing, I don’t work on Azure, so I have no say in how often FreeBSD images are updated.
* - Personal desktop/laptop does dual-boot Windows 10 and FreeBSD CURRENT