Today I had a problem while installing "cvsup" package in my FreeBSD development system. pkg_add was constantly failing to fetch files from the remote repository. Here is the error message that I was getting.
#pkg_add -r cvsup
Error: Unable to get ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-8.2-release/Latest/cvsup.tbz: Syntax error, command unrecognized
pkg_add: unable to fetch 'ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-8.2-release/Latest/cvsup.tbz' by URL
Tried setting the passive mode ftp with
setenv FTP_PASSIVE_MODE 1
and re-ran the pkg_add command but with out any luck. Then I tried
#pkg_add -rv cvsup
Which gave me the following verbrose output.
Error: Unable to get ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-8.2-release/Latest/cvsup.tbz: Syntax error, command unrecognized
pkg_add: unable to fetch 'ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-8.2-release/Latest/cvsup.tbz' by URL
freebsd# pkg_add -rv cvsup
scheme: [ftp]
user: []
password: []
host: [ftp.freebsd.org]
port: [0]
document: [/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-8.2-release/Latest/cvsup.tbz]
---> ftp.freebsd.org:21
looking up ftp.freebsd.org
connecting to ftp.freebsd.org:21
<<< 220 Welcome to freebsd.isc.org.
>>> USER anonymous
<<< 331 Please specify the password.
>>> PASS [email protected]
<<< 500 OOPS: cannot change directory:/home/ftp
Error: Unable to get ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-8.2-release/Latest/cvsup.tbz: Syntax error, command unrecognized
pkg_add: unable to fetch 'ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-8.2-release/Latest/cvsup.tbz' by URL
pkg_add: 1 package addition(s) failed
With the above detailed error report, it seems that the ftp server at ftp.freebsd.org is not configured well or is broken. So I checked the DNS record of ftp.freebsd.org with;
#dig ftp.freebsd.org
ftp.freebsd.org. 180 IN A 204.152.184.73
ftp.freebsd.org. 180 IN A 87.51.34.132
ftp.freebsd.org. 180 IN A 149.20.64.73
It turned out that there were three hosts associated with ftp.freebsd.org. I randomly picked up one hoping that it will not be same as the one that pkg_add is currently connecting to and set and environment variable
# setenv PACKAGEROOT ftp://149.20.64.73/
and re-ran the command
# pkg_add -r cvsup
and it started installing the packages, including the dependencies.
