management

[mike at lanline.com]

Hi all,

	Sorry, I know I've asked a question similar to this in the past,
but...  I am currently in the process of migrating from BSD/OS to
FreeBSD.  I'm very concerned with the management of my new FreeBSD server
farm.  There doesn't seem to be much documentation in the way of large
scale FreeBSD management.  I posted a question recently about upgrades
(having one server w/ the source and NFS mounting the source dirs to all
the other machines and building that way), but I feel like some minor
details are missing.  Like, can I or should I redirect the obj code to a
directory on the local machine so I don't have to do a make clean as I go
from server to server (and if so, can I do this through make.conf)?  Same
thing with ports. Also, I know about portupgrade, but is that the best way
to manage ports?  Is there something better?  And the port system
itself... I know it's supposed to provide all this flexibility, but there
doesn't seem to be any documentation about what variables can be set or
anything (e.g. can I force the binary to get installed in a certain dir?)
I know I could look in the makefiles and stuff, but I really don't have
that kind of time (damn sys. admining)  Is there some documentation or
something I don't know about that answers questions like these?  I mean
the handbook is great for general config. questions, but I'm more
interested in server farm management and maintenance.

Thank you very much in advance for any help.
Hopefully I won't have many more stupid questions.

-Mike