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

[Jez Hancock]

On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 04:40:00PM -0800, lee slaughter wrote:
> thanks for any clarification i can get on:
>    1. which is best "production" version

As already highlighted, 4.x is touted as being production quality.
However there are no doubt plenty of users on this forum that use 5.x in
production environments who would testify that 5.x is of production
quality.

>    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)

The best thing to do is to cvsup your source to the latest RELEASE branch of
whichever version you decide to stick with (say 4.9), then make build|installworld
to bring it up to the very latest in terms of security and other
essential fixes.  From this point you can then afford to ONLY apply
essential security patches which are released to the
freebsd-announce mailing list (make sure you're subscribed to it:P)

See the handbook for more info:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cutting-edge.html
- essential reading for what you want to do - especially:

  http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/current-stable.html
  - which covers the subtleties between the different branches, current
	and stable - annoyingly RELEASE isn't mentioned on that page, not
	sure why - it's mentioned in the cvs-tags link below though.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cvsup.html
- about using cvsup to keep up to date - lengthy but good

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cvs-tags.html
- about cvs tags, which you need to know about when cvsup'ing

Also see the cvsup supfile examples in:

/usr/src/share/examples/cvsup/

these give you a good overview of how to structure your cvsup supfile,
although this is also covered in the 3rd link above.

-- 
Jez Hancock
 - System Administrator / PHP Developer

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