Upgrade from Freebsd from 10.3 to 11

@wikro

No problem – What I would recommend doing at this point, if you’ve not already, is to submit a ticket through the DigitalOcean Control Panel and see if the support team can lend a hand.

If they Droplet won’t boot at all, even when attempting to access it from the console provided through the CP, they should be able to help more than I could here since I don’t have physical access to the core machine your droplet is on (I just do my best to help here in the community).

I don’t really like telling members to submit a ticket, though when it’s something that’s physically out of my control, that’s the best course of action.

@wikro

I don’t use FreeBSD much, though I did a little research and what you’re experiencing pops up quite a bit. Some posts have solutions, some not so much.

What I did find was one user who actually performed and update + upgrade from 10.x to 11.x. You can check that post out here.

When you went to upgrade, did you first run:

freebsd-update fetch

then

freebsd-update install

and finally

freebsd-update -r 11.0-RELEASE upgrade

to handle the upgrade? If not, that may be the issue. From what I’m reading, FreeBSD doesn’t perform updates & upgrades with a single command (much like how Ubuntu handles things), so you’ll need to perform each step individually, otherwise you may end up with the same results.

That said, what I recommend doing, if you don’t or haven’t already, is always take a snapshot of your droplet before you perform major updates or upgrades. Doing so will allow you to quickly revert back to the previous state should something like this happen.

I just tried to do the same upgrade. I got a bootable droplet, but non-fuctional. I couldn’t ssh into it. Basically I’m just bumping this message hoping someone else is watching. I don’t think this is really a job for Digital Ocean to investigate every 10.3 to 11 upgrade. Certainly not at the prices these droplets cost. But if someone has success doing the upgrade, I hope they post what they did.

Edit: I see a post indicating there is a freebsd 11 droplet now. I will try this “alternative” I wrote:

As an alternative, if Digital Ocean sets up a fresh FreeBSD 11 droplet, I would get another droplet for a while , getting my site going on it, then once it works, move that snapshot back my regular IP. I don’t see this upgrade going smoothly enough just take the server down a few hours and get it running the upgrade promptly