pfSense

There are certain environments where users see an error notification when logging in after (re)booting which reads:

check_upgrade: "Updating repositories metadata" returned error code 1

This does not affect most installations, and can be difficult to reproduce. Most devices never encounter the error, some devices only encounter the error occasionally, a handful encounter the error at every boot. The error is too vague to know if each potential problem scenario is related.

At least at boot this error may be due to a race condition between /etc/rc.update_pkg_metadata attempting to run while certctl rehash is still running. On slow systems the certctl rehash process can take about 2 minutes to finish.

On a VM which can reproduce this error at every boot, delaying /etc/rc.update_pkg_metadata by 130 seconds allows it to complete without error. Similarly, commenting out the call to certctl rehash in the CA trust store process also allows it to complete without error.