opkg upgrade on a Beaglebone black is officially evil.  Just don't do it.  Bad things happen.  Just flash to the latest image and do an opkg update.  You should be good to go on your Beaglebone black.

Updating Beaglebone black out of the box using ethernet and ssh seems to run into problems with opkg update; opkg upgrade step.

Steps to reproduce:

1.  Get a brand new Beaglebone black out of the box
2. Upgrade the image to the 06-20-2013 image using an MMC card
• Used the link from http://beagleboard.org/latest-images
• Grabbed the eMMC flasher image
• Uncompressed the image and burned a MicroSD card
• Followed http://learn.adafruit.com/beaglebone-black-installing-operating-systems/flashing-the-beaglebone-black
3. rebooted Beaglebone connected via Ethernet
4. ssh'ed into the Beaglebone black
5. ran "opkg update", everything ok
6. did "opkg upgrade", things work for a while and then you get
   

   Downloading http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/feeds/unstable/ipk/glibc/armv7a//Packages.gz.wget: bad address 'www.angstrom-distribution.org'Downloading http://feeds.angstrom-distribution.org/feeds/v2012.12/ipk/eglibc/armv7a-vfp-neon/base/Packages.gz.wget: bad address 'feeds.angstrom-distribution.org'Downloading http://feeds.angstrom-distribution.org/feeds/v2012.12/ipk/eglibc/armv7a-vfp-neon/machine/beaglebone/Packages.gz.wget: bad address 'feeds.angstrom-distribution.org'Downloading http://feeds.angstrom-distribution.org/feeds/v2012.12/ipk/eglibc/armv7a-vfp-neon/debug/Packages.gz.wget: bad address 'feeds.angstrom-distribution.org'

   ...

Steps to fix:

My quick hack is to edit /etc/hosts and add in the IP address of feeds.angstrom-distribution.org

140.211.169.179 feeds.angstrom-distribution.org

So, my /etc/hosts file now looks like

root@beaglebone:~# cd /etc
root@beaglebone:/etc# vi hosts
root@beaglebone:/etc# cat hosts
127.0.0.1       localhost.localdomain           localhost
140.211.169.179 feeds.angstrom-distribution.org
127.0.0.1 beaglebone
root@beaglebone:/etc#

Now, opkg upgrade seems to work fine.

Please note that this is a HACK.  Please remove the line from your /etc/hosts after the upgrade is done.

UPDATE:

The upgrade finished, but had lots of errors of not enough space, and then it dropped the ssh connection.  Rebooting it and attempting to restart opkg upgrade fails.

I'm beginning to think the correct way is to avoid opkg upgrade, or as http://www.circuidipity.com/getting-started-with-beaglebone-black.html put it:

'opkg upgrade'

Fix: Do not run this command or else Bad Things Will Happen.