production box: 4.9, 5.1, 5.2+ ???

lee slaughter lee at slaughters.com
Tue Mar 2 16:41:35 PST 2004


I hesitate to ask this because it sounds stupid.

I went down to the tech book store and bought freeBSD on CD's.
it happened to be 5.1. 
I, a neophyte, assumed it was "kosher".

I bought it and installed it on 2 machines  and pretty much ok so far.
Now I've been reading about the STABLE and CURRENT branches
and cvsup and all other kinds of "keeping up".

What I want is production boxs with of course bug fix and
security upgrades, but not needing always the latest app releases.

I've tried to grok the release engineering and all but I don't get it.
I'm going to put freeBSD on 2 other machines as well,
but don't know whether
to install 4.9, use my 5.1 CD's (and then presumably have to
go to 5.2 + ??? to keep up?), 5.2   or what.  Not to mention the
2 already installed.

I want to keep all 4 machines pretty much in synch.

thanks for any clarification i can get on:
    1. which is best "production" version
    2. what is best essential upkeep mechanism (not so much for apps
       but for bug fixes in OS and security fixes/patches on essential stuff
       like OpenSsh)

thanks much...........

lee







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