How do YOU stay up to date?

[Drew Tomlinson]

Roger 'Rocky' Vetterberg told a big fish story including the following 
on 1/15/2004 2:34 AM:

> Duane Winner wrote:
>
>> Hello all again,
>>
>> I'm finally getting my arms around FreeBSD and the updating processes
>> and tools. But I'm still trying to come up with good
>> habits/methods/instructions for updating routines for both myself and my
>> colleagues who also want to switch to FreeBSD.
>>
>> I now understand how to use cvsup to keep my src and ports tree current.
>> I know how to use pkg_add -r to install new sotware, or go into
>> /usr/ports/whatever to make install. I know how to do portupgrade to
>> upgrade my installed ports, how to pkg_version -v to see what's out of
>> date with my tree, and how to cronjob cvsup to keep my trees current. (I
>> still need to play more with make world and whatnot)
>>
>> But what do you all out there in BSD land do to stay current as a
>> practice? I'm looking at this on two fronts: FreeBSD on our laptops
>> (There will be at least 3 of us with T23's, and I also plan on migrating
>> most, if not all of my servers from Linux to FreeBSD).
>
>
> If you have the resources, you should consider using a dedicated 
> machine for compiling.
> With ~10 laptops, a bunch of workstations and about 20-25 servers 
> running FreeBSD we use 2 dedicated machines that does nothing but 
> download sources and compiles them. One is tracking 4.x-STABLE and the 
> other 5.x-RELEASE. Anyone can nfs mount choosen directories from these 
> machines and install the pre-compiled software.
> It works extremely well, once the users have learned the correct process.

I've been contemplating this setup.  I know I can use portupgrade to 
build packages and then just install packages on other machines but 
don't understand the details.  Is it difficult to set up?  Can you point 
me to a web tutorial?

Thanks,

Drew