To upgrade FreeBSD from 13.0 to 14.3, there is a need to upgrade to 13.2 in advance as there is an important patch according to some nice comments on Reddit, and I can prove it.

I upgraded from 13.0 -> 13.1 -> 13.2 -> 13.5 -> 14.0 -> 14.3

Hereby is the commands:

freebsd-update fetch
freebsd-update install
freebsd-update -r 13.2-RELEASE upgrade
freebsd-update install

## then do a reboot
shutdown -r now
freebsd-update install
## then better another reboot and upgrade packages
shutdown -r now
pkg-static upgrade -f

## finally a install and reboot again
freebsd-update install
shutdown -r now

Still something happened and the solution reserved to be marked.

can not login through ssh

This is because the new configuration file merged with old one and you need to edit it manually, if you do not edit it, the daemon sshd will refuse to start thus can not accept remote login.

Remove the followings:

====

««<

And correct the following line according to the output of command ssh -Q cipher

Ciphers 3des-cbc,aes128-cbc,aes192-cbc,aes256-cbc,aes128-ctr,aes192-ctr,aes256-ctr,aes128-gcm@openssh.com,aes256-gcm@openssh.com,chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com

caddy server can not start after upgrade

# service caddy start
Starting caddy... Error: Caddy failed to start
Check the caddy log: /var/log/caddy/caddy.log

So I take a look at the log file

Error: loading initial config: loading new config: http app module: start: listening on :443: listen tcp :443: bind: permission denied
Error: caddy process exited with error: exit status 1

The reason is about non-privileged user can not open port 443, we need to add a package named portacl-rc:

# pkg install security/portacl-rc
# sysrc portacl_users+=www
# sysrc portacl_user_www_tcp="http https"
# sysrc portacl_user_www_udp="https"
# service portacl enable
# service portacl start

Then do some config jobs:

# service caddy enable # 请按顺序执行
# service caddy start # 请按顺序执行
# service caddy stop # 请按顺序执行
# sysrc caddy_user=www caddy_group=www
# chown -R www:www /var/db/caddy /var/log/caddy /var/run/caddy

upgrade mariadb from 11.4 to 11.8

Actually I got very nice instructions from Upgrade MariaDB from 10.6 LTS to 11.8 LTS, hereby is the key steps:

backup in advance

mysqldump --all-databases > /root/mysql-upgrade-backup-$(date +%Y%m%d).sql

tar -cvzf /root/mysql_config_backup_$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz /usr/local/etc/mysql

Then stop service and install it:

service mysql-server stop
pkg install mariadb118-server

Then start it again:

service mysql-server start

mariadb-upgrade -u root -p

There is no need to remove the old MariaDB packages as it will be removed automatically.

error with mariadb-upgrade

There is a very frequent error as below:

ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user ‘root’@’localhost’ (using password: NO)

As the correct way to run this command:

Before

mariadb-upgrade

After (Correct way)

mariadb-upgrade -u root -p

For more errors, check this post.

/etc/master.passwd

When upgrade from 13.2 to 14.0, there is a big change that need you pay a close look and edit it, as the default shell for root changed from csh to sh in FreeBSD 14.

You’d better to change the shell of root from /usr/bin/csh to /usr/bin/sh and keep your existing part still as below:

root:$900$2dwsWdTSXoA/.pz2$n1zXjcF9kO6ERUooHHcYZWmtb/HwtaR4xU5MY48VDisYAvypYGCbHI6ietZXFlkoRGnpeUYIG6qXN1OD4q.uS60:0:0::0:0:Charlie &:/root:/bin/sh