[freebsd-isp] Avoiding source code on production servers

[Howard Jones]

Tonix (Antonio Nati) wrote:
> I'm in the phase of planning my new generation of FreeBSD servers, and
> I would love to make them more easy to upgrade.
> Main problem I have currently is I do not want any source code on
> production server, so freebsd-update is welcome, but... what about
> packages?
> I would use packages, but they are not easy to upgrade, while ports
> can be easy to upgrade, but need to have sources an servers.
>
> What do you suggest me? What is currently done on other environments?
We have a local build server, which is the source for PXE installation
of FreeBSD with our chosen set of packages, and also the server that
builds local packages (things that don't have packages in the standard
distro). It doesn't have to be anything fancy, and in fact ours is a VM
since it gets used fairly rarely.

I haven't got a nice way to do distribution of the packages though (like
portsnap/freebsd-update/yum). That would make it more useful! As it is,
we still update servers the 'old way'.