After noticing boinc was not active for days, all I was receiving was an ambitious "transient HTTP error" message.

FreeBSD Boinc Client - Transient HTTP error.md

Problem: boinc is not running any tasks and logs show errors like:

25-Apr-2018 13:33:27 [World Community Grid] Temporarily failed upload of MCM1_0141526_9856_0_r1232334159_0: transient HTTP error

(that's not very helpful...)

Finding additional information:

Adding debug information to the cc_config.xml

╭─jivanov@irony ~
╰─$ cat /var/db/boinc/cc_config.xml
<cc_config>
    <log_flags>
        ...
        <file_xfer>1</file_xfer>
        <sched_ops>1</sched_ops>
        <file_xfer_debug>1</file_xfer_debug>
        <http_debug>1</http_debug>
        <http_xfer_debug>1</http_xfer_debug>
        ...
    </log_flags>
    ...
</cc_config>

Restart boinc

╭─jivanov@irony ~
╰─$ sudo service boinc-client restart

The source of the problem is revealed:

25-Apr-2018 13:33:26 [World Community Grid] [http] HTTP error: Peer certificate cannot be authenticated with given CA certificates
25-Apr-2018 13:33:27 [World Community Grid] [file_xfer] http op done; retval -184 (transient HTTP error)
25-Apr-2018 13:33:27 [World Community Grid] [file_xfer] http op done; retval -184 (transient HTTP error)
25-Apr-2018 13:33:27 [World Community Grid] [file_xfer] file transfer status -184 (transient HTTP error)
25-Apr-2018 13:33:27 [World Community Grid] Temporarily failed upload of MCM1_0141526_9856_0_r1232334159_0: transient HTTP error

The fix:

Originally there was a ca-bundle.crt file in /var/db/boinc which I renamed to ca-bundle.crt.bak and symlinked ca-bundle.crt to /usr/local/share/certs/ca-root-nss.crt. In this instance, there appears to be a problem with my /usr/local/share/certs/ca-root-nss.crt file so I renamed the alias and decided to let boinc use the ca-bundle.crt from https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/blob/master/curl/ca-bundle.crt:

╭─jivanov@irony ~
╰─$ sudo mv /var/db/boinc/ca-bundle.crt /var/db/boinc/ca-bundle.crt.old

╭─jivanov@irony ~
╰─$ sudo wget -O /var/db/boinc/ca-bundle.crt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/BOINC/boinc/master/curl/ca-bundle.crt

╭─jivanov@irony ~
╰─$ sudo chown boinc:boinc /var/db/boinc/ca-bundle.crt

After restarting boinc, all is well again!

╭─jivanov@irony ~
╰─$ sudo service boinc-client restart

NOTE: This was run on FreeBSD 11.1

╭─jivanov@irony ~
╰─$ uname -a
FreeBSD irony 11.1-RELEASE-p4 FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE-p4 #0: Tue Nov 14 06:12:40 UTC 2017     [email protected]:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  amd64