[wplug-bsd] How do you update ports.

[Bill Moran]

Brian Roberts wrote:

<snip>

> I'm also wondering how people handle multiple servers,  do you share 
> /usr/src, /usr/obj, and /usr/ports via NFS?    Do you make ports on one 
> box install them on others?   Is there an easy way to utilize a more 
> powerful box for compile and package up the end result to move it to a 
> slower system?

I had a nice system for a while, but now I have a mix of both 4.9 and 5.2
systems and it's fallen apart a little.

Partially, it depends on you needs, but here are two things you can do:

1) In any port, you can do "make package" and it will wrap up a tgz for
    you to use pkg_add on another machine.  This can save a lot of time,
    and I use it extensively to build/install OpenOffice (for some reason,
    OpenOffice packages don't get updated too often ... could be the 12
    hour build time?)  Basically, I build it on my server (during off
    hours, if possible) and use pkg_add to install it on the multiple
    FreeBSD servers.  This hits a snag because OpenOffice (and many other
    ports) have to be built seperately for 5 and 4.
2) You can mount /usr/ports via nfs, thus you only have to keep one
    machine updated and all your other machines can use it for port
    builds (not at the same time, though!)  Also, you can create your
    own cvsup server so that it cvsups from the main FreeBSD servers,
    then your other machines can cvsup off it ... this saves a lot of
    time and bandwidth, and you can make the main machine update from
    cron, so it's reasonably up to date.  I've been doing this a lot
    more because it seems like compiling with machine-specific
    optimizations is usually worthwhile (see
    http://www.potentialtech.com/wmoran/source.php )

Hope this helps.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com