# freebsd-update fails to fetch metadata files



## exist (Sep 11, 2019)

Hi,

12.0-p10 system. This was arrived at by upgrading an old 12-stable system (r349995)

# freebsd-version -ku
12.0-RELEASE-p10
12.0-RELEASE-p10

 # freebsd-update fetch
Looking up update.FreeBSD.org mirrors... 3 mirrors found.
Fetching metadata signature for 12.0-RELEASE from update4.freebsd.org... done.
Fetching metadata index... done.
Fetching 2 metadata files... failed.

deleting and re-creating /var/db/freebsd-update makes no difference. There's plenty of disk space.

There's a few reports of this but never a fix, and not for this version. How to fix?

thanks


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## exist (Sep 11, 2019)

I remembered - phttpget was missing

so the fix is 
cd /usr/src/usr.sbin/portsnap/phttpget && make && make install


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## SirDice (Sep 12, 2019)

exist said:


> I remembered - phttpget was missing


Why would it be 'missing'? Did you remove it?


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## exist (Sep 12, 2019)

SirDice said:


> Why would it be 'missing'? Did you remove it?


not directly. It was an old 12-stable system that I wanted to bring up to 12.0-p10 so the OS could be managed with freebsd-update. It had, as 12-stable, WITHOUT_FREEBSD_UPDATE defined in /etc/src.conf. I removed it before getting 12.0-p10 sources

But it seems that even in removing WITHOUT_FREEBSD_UPDATE, downloading sources and building/installing everything, freebsd-update wasn't automatically made [and I don't know why that would be]. So in the end, I had to do the following to get a working freebsd-update:

1. cd /usr/src/usr.sbin/freebsd-update
2. make && make install
3. cd /usr/src/usr.sbin/portsnap/phttpget
4. make && make install


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## driesm (Sep 12, 2019)

Do you have WITHOUT_PORTSNAP= defined?
Because https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=228220.
Which was committed to head back in the day which is now FreeBSD 12.X.


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## exist (Sep 12, 2019)

Duffyx said:


> Do you have WITHOUT_PORTSNAP= defined?
> Because https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=228220.
> Which was committed to head back in the day which is now FreeBSD 12.X.



yes! so that's it

thanks for solving this


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