After my initial success yesterday with pkgbasify, today, I hit a block. This was my fourth host conversion.
In this post:
- FreeBSD 15.0
The block
There I was, minding my own business, when this jumped up and hit me.
[root@tallboy:~] # sudo bectl create before-pkgbasify [root@tallboy:~] # uname -a FreeBSD tallboy.unixathome.org 15.0-RELEASE-p10 FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE-p10 GENERIC amd64 [root@tallboy:~] # fetch https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/pkgbasify/raw/refs/heads/main/pkgbasify.lua pkgbasify.lua 21 kB 1910 kBps 00s [root@tallboy:~] # chmod +x ./pkgbasify.lua [root@tallboy:~] # ./pkgbasify.lua /var/empty is a readonly zfs filesystem. This will cause conversion to fail as pkg will be unable to set the time of /var/empty. Set readonly=off and run pkgbasify again. [root@tallboy:~] #
So, what do we have here?
[root@tallboy:~] # zfs list | grep /var/empty system/var/empty 96K 262G 96K /var/empty [root@tallboy:~] # zfs get readonly system/var/empty NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE system/var/empty readonly on local [root@tallboy:~] #
This is an 11 year old system:
[root@tallboy:~] # zfs get creation system NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE system creation Tue Feb 17 23:44 2015 -
It is not the only such host I have with this filesystem. See:
[14:21 zuul dvl ~] % zfs list | grep empty system/var/empty 144K 150G 144K /var/empty [14:21 zuul dvl ~] % zfs get readonly system/var/empty NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE system/var/empty readonly on local [14:22 zuul dvl ~] % zfs get creation system NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE system creation Sat Dec 7 0:28 2013 -
Even older, but that host (zuul) has not been updated yet.
Either this is lingering issue from how zroot used to be set out, or it’s something I did myself, way-back-when.
What is this used for?
This is where /var/empty comes in:
[14:21 tallboy dvl ~] % grep empty /etc/passwd sshd:*:22:22:Secure Shell Daemon:/var/empty:/usr/sbin/nologin _pflogd:*:64:64:pflogd privsep user:/var/empty:/usr/sbin/nologin _dhcp:*:65:65:dhcp programs:/var/empty:/usr/sbin/nologin auditdistd:*:78:77:Auditdistd unprivileged user:/var/empty:/usr/sbin/nologin _ypldap:*:160:160:YP LDAP unprivileged user:/var/empty:/usr/sbin/nologin hast:*:845:845:HAST unprivileged user:/var/empty:/usr/sbin/nologin dovecot:*:143:143:Dovecot User:/var/empty:/usr/sbin/nologin dovenull:*:144:144:Dovecot login User:/var/empty:/usr/sbin/nologin _tss:*:601:601:TCG Software Stack user:/var/empty:/usr/sbin/nologin [14:28 tallboy dvl ~] %
The simple attempt
Let’s try this:
[14:28 tallboy dvl ~] % sudo zfs set readonly=off system/var/empty [14:29 tallboy dvl ~] %
To be reversed after the update.
Not shown
The rest of the pkgbasify process went as describe in Running pkgbasify on FreeBSD 15.0 – then I rebooted.
After boot
[10:40 pro05 dvl ~] % tallboy Last login: Tue Jun 30 14:43:17 2026 from tmux(2182).%0 [14:43 tallboy dvl ~] % uptime 2:44PM up 2 mins, 2 users, load averages: 0.77, 0.29, 0.11 [14:44 tallboy dvl ~] % sudo zfs set readonly=on system/var/empty [14:44 tallboy dvl ~] % sudo shutdown -r now Shutdown NOW! shutdown: [pid 6922]
Perhaps I could have reset readonly before reboot… however….
After the reboot, all was well.
