When is BuildWorld necessary?

[pauls at utdallas.edu]

--On September 17, 2006 6:18:24 AM +0200 pobox at verysmall.org wrote:

> Bob wrote:
>> On Saturday 16 September 2006 15:52, pobox at verysmall.org wrote:
>>
>>> But I have one question - do you rebuild the world on a remote machine
>>
>> Sorry; I am a newbie at FreeBSD, and have never done a buildworld :-( I
>> have  spent lots of time on Linux, Solaris, and SCO, but this is my
>> first cut at  BSD.
>>
>> Just from past NIX experience though, I would never rebuild an entire
>> OS  remotely without having someone onsite to push the On/Off switch
>> when the  inevitable happens :-(
>
> We have someone to push the switch. I just thought if it is possible to
> be done without engaging the support.
>
No one has mentioned the security/freebsd-update port.  With that you can 
apply updates to the kernel and world without having to build them *if* 
(and only if!) you are running a GENERIC kernel.  For remote 
administration, this may be a good option for some.

I've done a number of build world and kernel routines without a problem.

make buildworld
make buildkernel
make installkernel
reboot

mergemaster -p
make install world
mergemaster
reboot

This has worked for me on three different systems, all of which are easily 
accessible if something goes wrong.  I have one server that's about 20 
miles away and much more critical than the others (in terms of uptime and 
accessibility) *and* I don't have remote access to the server through a 
KVM or similar.  For that one I use freebsd-update, because I don't want 
to have to suddenly jump in the car and drive 30 minutes (while the server 
is down) to fix a problem.

Paul Schmehl (pauls at utdallas.edu)
Adjunct Information Security Officer
The University of Texas at Dallas
http://www.utdallas.edu/ir/security/