FreeBSD is designed for users who got lots of spare time. Every once a while, it will give you some troubles (or “snacks” in programmer language), which help you to burn some of your spare time. If you cannot handle these troubles, then FreeBSD is not for you.

Although FreeBSD is a rock solid operating system, it is not smart enough to tell whether the owners (i.e., you and me) got plenty of spare time or not. Anyway, comparing to Windows Server, I think FreeBSD is considered an honor student already.

Okay, let’s go back to the error message. When I tried to update FreeBSD, I got the following error message:

Building new INDEX files... done.
===>>> Starting check of installed ports for available updates

===>>> The net/samba35 port has been deleted: Obsoleted by net/samba36
===>>> Aborting update

Terminated

Again, this is an old-school error. The port-maintainer decided that the samba35 is too old, and he likes to replace it by samaba36. We all love the new stuffs, but we want the transition goes smooth too. Apparently, it seems that the port-maintainer totally forgot about it.

If you check the directory, you will notice that /usr/ports/net/samba35 is deleted. If you try to soft-link samba36 to samba35, portmaster will likely to complain. The only way to solve this problem is by removing samba35 first, and installing samaba36 afterward.

So here is how to solve this problem:

sudo pkg_info | grep samba35

You will see something like the following:

samba35-3.5.19      A free SMB and CIFS client and server for UNIX

Let’s delete it.

sudo pkg_delete -f samba35-3.5.19

FreeBSD may remind you to manually remove Samba’s configuration, DO NOT do it.

WARNING: If you will *NOT* use this package anymore, please remove the
  following directories manually:
  /usr/local/etc/samba
  /var/log/samba
  /var/db/samba

Verify that the package has been deleted. The package should be gone.

sudo pkg_info | grep samba35

Now try to install the package again:

cd /usr/ports/net/samba36
sudo make install clean

After the installation is completed, don’t forget to start the Samba server:

sudo /usr/local/etc/rc.d/samba start

That’s it!

–Derrick