I’m ready to update r730-01 (I see that link is from 2024 – I’ll refresh it after this update) from FreeBSD 14.2 to FreeBSD 14.3.
First, some clean up:
[21:04 r730-01 dvl ~] % bectl list BE Active Mountpoint Space Created 14.2-RELEASE-p4_2025-08-08_112039 - - 342M 2025-08-08 11:20 default NR / 11.6G 2024-06-19 16:38 testing - - 74.0M 2025-08-09 10:59 [21:04 r730-01 dvl ~] % sudo bectl destroy 14.2-RELEASE-p4_2025-08-08_112039 [21:04 r730-01 dvl ~] % sudo bectl destroy testing
And a save-point:
[21:05 r730-01 dvl ~] % sudo bectl create before-14.3 [21:05 r730-01 dvl ~] % bectl list BE Active Mountpoint Space Created before-14.3 - - 8K 2025-09-02 21:05 default NR / 10.8G 2024-06-19 16:38 [21:05 r730-01 dvl ~] %
With that, I hopefully have a good save point to go back to.
The update
I’ll be following the official docs for this.
I always like to be on the latest of what I’m on:
[21:05 r730-01 dvl ~] % sudo freebsd-update fetch install src component not installed, skipped Looking up update.FreeBSD.org mirrors... 3 mirrors found. Fetching metadata signature for 14.2-RELEASE from update2.freebsd.org... done. Fetching metadata index... done. Inspecting system... done. Preparing to download files... done. No updates needed to update system to 14.2-RELEASE-p5. WARNING: FreeBSD 14.2-RELEASE-p1 is approaching its End-of-Life date. It is strongly recommended that you upgrade to a newer release within the next 4 weeks. No updates are available to install.
Especially before starting a major upgrade.
The upgrade
Note that I have used update to refer to the minor update, and I have used upgrade to refer to the major update.
Next, I started a tmux session and issued this command:
sudo freebsd-update -r 14.3-RELEASE upgrade
It is a good time I used tmux. It is now 3 days later and I’ve come back to this. There will be questions, and you’ll have to muddle your way through it.
I was met with this output:
To install the downloaded upgrades, run 'freebsd-update [options] install'.
I ran that command, and ended up here:
[13:47 r730-01 dvl ~] % sudo freebsd-update install src component not installed, skipped Creating snapshot of existing boot environment... done. Installing updates... Kernel updates have been installed. Please reboot and run 'freebsd-update [options] install' again to finish installing updates.
After the reboot, I issued the mentioned command:
[14:08 r730-01 dvl ~] % sudo freebsd-update install src component not installed, skipped Creating snapshot of existing boot environment... done. Installing updates... Restarting sshd after upgrade Performing sanity check on sshd configuration. Stopping sshd. Waiting for PIDS: 2235, 2235. Performing sanity check on sshd configuration. Starting sshd. done.
At this point, we have:
[14:09 r730-01 dvl ~] % freebsd-version -ukr 14.3-RELEASE-p2 14.3-RELEASE-p2 14.3-RELEASE-p2
That’s everything. I did a sudo shutdown -r now just do I know everything is running on the new stuff.
It’s now mostly all green on Nagios. We’re done.
