I can not complete bench update on a fresh erpnext clean installation. My mariadb is on another server.
Patching sites...
Migrating vgs.computer
mariadb service is not running.
Cannot run bench migrate without the services running.
If you are running bench in development mode, make sure that bench is running:
$ bench start
Otherwise, check the server logs and ensure that all the required services are running.
Update:
I solved this by adding db_host to /sites/common_site_config.json