The value of DISTDIR cannot be empty - FreeBSD jails upgraded from 9.10-11

[KevDog]

I recently upgraded from 9.10 to FreeNAS 11. Surprisingly all the jails seemed to boot after the upgrade, however I'm having an issue upgrading with the FreeBSD created jails. pkg upgrades work fine, however when try to install from ports using portmaster, I get the following error:

Port Master Packages Needing Upgrading:
libuv-1.18.0
vim-8.0.1365


===>>> The value of DISTDIR cannot be empty
===>>> Aborting update

I don't ever remember setting the value of DISTDIR anywhere on the prior installation. I only found one other post addressing this topic for freenas: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/the-value-of-distdir-cannot-be-empty.44804/ however this dealt with upgrading from 9.2 to 9.10.

 

[dlavigne]

Makes sense due to the ABI change between major versions (in this case between FreeBSD 10 and 11). The recommendation is to reinstall your jails after a major version bump if you plan to update the software running inside the jail.