Re: Unable to boot after update from within auto-admin

On 5/10/26 15:52, linuxblood wrote:
> On Sunday, May 10th, 2026 at 8:15 PM, Dag-Erling Smørgrav <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> I've never used auto-admin but I don't think this is fair.  We don't
>> know exactly what it did to render your system unbootable.  It is
>> possible that a manual upgrade would have had the same result.  I
>> suggest you have a chat with Jason about it, I'm sure he'll be happy to
>> help figure out what went wrong.
> 
> I sincerely apologize. I didn't mean to be rude. I was just so frustrated over the ordeal and my comment was going overboard, I'm sorry.
> 
> I'm sure the program is useful, but the way I discovered it with an out of place popup and how badly it borked my system was unusual to say the least.
> 
> I'm happy to discuss anything with the developer(s) but I'm not all that experienced with FreeBSD yet to be able to have a useful dialogue, beyond how my install was setup, what occurred, etc.
> 
> Everyone in the world of FreeBSD has been so kind to me, I don't mean to ruffle any feathers.

I did not see the original message, so I have no idea what the 
circumstances even were, but if the update was in response to a popup 
message, that would mean routine package, ports, and base updates, 
performed by auto-update-system via freebsd-update-notify.  It's highly 
unlikely that auto-update-system would lead to any issues, since all it 
ultimately does is run "pkg upgrade", "git pull", and "freebsd-update 
fetch install" (if not using pkgbase).  Beyond that, it mostly just 
performs a lot of checks, to inform the user if a reboot is needed, etc.

The auto-upgrade-base script (which does not yet do anything with 
pkgbase), would pose a slightly higher risk, but also merely automates 
the same commands the user would run by hand (freebsd-update upgrade, 
freebsd-update install, reboot, freebsd-update install).

I've been using both these tools for many years (auto-upgrade-base 
probably 100 times, auto-update-system thousands of times) and never 
experienced an unbootable system following their use.  In fact, I can't 
actually recall a FreeBSD system ever becoming unbootable following an 
upgrade, even before I created these tools.

Only freebsd-update and pkg upgrade with pkgbase have the potential to 
lead to an unbootable system, and that's highly unlikely if the 
pre-update system was clean.

I would look for a hardware issue, or some sort of pre-existing system 
corruption caused by other activities before the update.


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