Freebsd-update question

[Richard Mahlerwein]

[random snippage all over]
> > From: Glen Barber <glen.j.barber at gmail.com>
> > Subject: Re: Freebsd-update question
> > On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 10:25 AM,
> > Richard Mahlerwein<mahlerrd at yahoo.com>
> > wrote:
> > mobius# freebsd-update -s update.freebsd.org fetch
> > Looking up update.freebsd.org mirrors... none found.
> > Fetching public key from update.freebsd.org... failed.
> > No mirrors remaining, giving up.
> >
> > mobius# uname -a
> > FreeBSD mobius 7.1-PRERELEASE
>   FreeBSD 7.1-PRERELEASE #0: Fri Sep  5 02:34:20 CDT 2008  
>   rich at mobius.mahlerwein.homeip.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC
>  i386
> 
> 
> I was able to get a mirror using:
> 
> freebsd-update -r 7.1-PRERELEASE fetch
> 
> -- 
> Glen Barber
> 

mobius# freebsd-update -r 7.1-PRERELEASE fetch
Looking up update1.FreeBSD.org mirrors... none found.
Fetching public key from update1.FreeBSD.org... failed.
No mirrors remaining, giving up.

I'm puzzled.  It seems like this shouldn't be hard, and google seems to agree.  There must be something stupidly simple messed up with my system, or configured incorrectly.  

What protocols/ports does freebsd-update use?  Watching tcpdump while running freebsd-update shows no traffic whatsoever relating to this that I can tell.  Makes me wish for a "verbose" mode on freebsd-update.  I fiddled with truss, but that seems harder to interpret than strace on linux (which I'm installing from the ports as I write this).

I mean, I'd just update it the old fashioned way, but now I'm curious (and, let's face it, I've not updated it in quite a while, so I suspect another day or two won't hurt any more).  I'm about to add a "verbose" option to freebsd-update and see if I can get it to print out in more detail what it's actually trying to do...